


You and Me and The Devil makes three..

by lavachick85



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Because it is. So much. In fact... Who the hell is canon?, Blood and Gore, Branding, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Canon-Typical Violence, Dark, Deities, F/M, Forget the tower, Graphic Description of torture-related Injuries, Guilt, How the hell do I tag this?, Hurt, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurts - Freeform, Hydra are assholes and that's a fact, I was serious about the AU, Illness, Kid Bucky Barnes, Let's borrow aspects of TWS and abandon everything else, M/M, Multi, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post Avengers, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Scars, Shapeshifting, Shield knows Hydra are still lurking around, So many hurts, Sort of? - Freeform, Starvation, Steve Rogers's patriotic booty, Steve is done with your shit Tony, Sweary Steve Rogers, Torture, We're all about the compound here, Winifred and George Barnes are good parents, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, and so it begins, did I mention AU?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:01:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 39,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22267579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lavachick85/pseuds/lavachick85
Summary: Winifred Barnes was a woman of faith.She was as kind as she was stubborn and she was not the type to back down from a fight, not when someone was in need of assistance. She would do just about anything within her power to help a friend in need, even if that meant giving that friend the shirt off her back or her last dollar. As long as her babies were warm and fed, she would give everything else away just to be sure that her friend or family member wasn’t going without. She was a giving person, strong, fearless…Nothing scared Winifred Barnes.Until her eldest child, her only son, fell ill, that is.**Bucky Barnes (and by default, Steve Rogers, because there's nothing about Bucky that Steve doesn't know) had a secret that he took to his grave.Steve Rogers woke up in the twenty first century to a world gone mad.Darcy Lewis tazed The God of Thunder.What would happen if you were to combine Bucky's secret, Steve's mad world and Darcy's godly adventures? Well, nobody sure as shit expected it to be this..
Relationships: Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Darcy Lewis, James "Bucky" Barnes/Darcy Lewis/Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 195
Kudos: 351





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Right. So.
> 
> I know that I haven't updated 'Penny for a good while, and yes, I know that I really should try to finish that one before I start another... But, well... I have no self control and I can't help myself. Start something else until you can get your head around 'Penny, it'll just be a time filler until you can get the next chapter written up... 
> 
> Lies. 
> 
> It's all lies.
> 
> That being said, this one is a little different this time - I'm really excited for it and I hope you guys will be too! A quick thank you to my darling wifelet for telling me this wasn't crap and all the peoples (you know who you are!) who are or have played cheerleader for this fic lately!
> 
> … talk about nerve wracking...

**1929**

Winifred Barnes was a woman of faith. She was as kind as she was stubborn and she was not the type to back down from a fight, not when someone was in need of assistance. She would do just about anything within her power to help a friend in need, even if that meant giving that friend the shirt off her back or her last dollar. As long as her babies were warm and fed, she would give everything else away just to be sure that her friend or family member wasn’t going without. She was a giving person, strong, fearless… Nothing scared Winifred Barnes.

Until her eldest child, her only son, fell ill, that is.

James had come down with a cold the week earlier and the sniffles that usually cleared away after a day or two (he was a resilient child, her James, strong and brave and so very protective of his younger sisters) were lingering far longer than they normally would. On the third day, well after his nose had turned pink and his eyes had glassed over from sneezing too much, she had gone to wake him for breakfast and had found him sleeping deeply, face flushed and brow sweaty. He was feverish and clammy, his bed clothes wet through and his breathing was accompanied by a terrible rattling in his chest. She could hear the congestion in his lungs with every shallow breath he took and in the days following he’d only grown worse. He was barely able to keep his eyes open and both she and her husband, George, had spent many an hour at his bedside taking turns to blot his face and neck with a cool, damp cloth and sing to him when he became delirious with fever.

Her baby was sick and she was absolutely terrified that he wasn’t going to survive.

She watched him through teary eyes as he slept, curled into a small dot on his side, blotchy cheek smashed into the too-thin pillow under his head. It was one of the nicest pillows they had been able to afford; he’d soaked through his old one with sweat and tears days ago so they’d had to replace it and, well, if her baby wasn’t long for this world, then she was going to keep him as comfortable as she could for as long as she could. The girls would moan and complain about eating nothing but bread and plain oatmeal for the foreseeable future, but her James needed comfort more than his sisters needed bananas on their oats. They would have to manage without.

James let out a muffled whimper in his sleep and Winifred pressed the back of her fingers against his cheek, then his brow and she frowned. He was even warmer than he had been an hour earlier and he’d since started to tremble, his loosely curled fingers twitching against the blankets sporadically. His eyebrows furrowed and his nose wrinkled as he whined in his sleep.

Seeing him in pain made her heart hurt. Her boy was a bright, vibrant, happy go lucky child who was just as likely to chatter your ear off about why the sky was blue as he was to charm the local shop keeper into giving him enough chocolate for free to feed not only himself, but his three sisters and the Rogers boy from down the street, too.

“Hush, my heart,” she soothed as he cried and stroked his hair back from his face and called for her second eldest, Rebecca, to bring a fresh bowl of water. It took a minute longer than it would have if she’d done it herself, but she was loath to leave his side for fear of the worst. Rebecca soon crept into the room, the door opening with a creak, her small hands curled around the biggest bowl she could find. Winifred shot her a watery smile and whispered her thanks as her daughter set it down beside her.

“Is Bucket gonna die, Mama?” Rebecca asked in a small voice, nervously wringing the hem of her dress with small fingers. Wide blue eyes were fixed on her sickly brother, her teeth dug into her bottom lip so deep that the skin was blanched white.

Winifred bit her tongue at the use of the nickname her girls had given their brother, desperate not to cry in front of her daughter and once she’d finished wringing out the now wet washcloth she cupped her cheek with her free hand. “Becca, baby,” she soothed, swiping away a fat tear from her chubby cheek, “We’re doing everything we can to keep him here with us. We aren’t giving him up without a fight, do you hear me? If your brother dies then your mama is going to drag him right back to us by his ear so he can sit through a very stern talking to!”

Rebecca giggled through her tears and when her mother scooted her from the room for fear of her becoming ill as well, she gave her brother a lingering look that was full of worry then quietly slipped back out the door. Winifred watched her go, her stomach heavy and eyes stinging.

She felt awful for the almost-lie she’d just told Rebecca. She was careful not to promise that James would recover, she wasn’t prepared to blatantly lie to her, but there was an awfully loud voice in her head that was screaming that he didn’t have long left.

A quiet murmur from the bed made her eyes widen and she turned back towards James, fighting tears as a startled laugh forced its way out of her. His eyes were open. She could barely see a sliver of his pale irises and his eyelids were heavy with exhaustion, but his eyes were open. Her baby was awake.

“Hey, sleepy head,” she cooed, fingers carding through his greasy, sweaty hair. He hadn’t bathed in days and usually that would vex her to the hills and back, but to see him awake and looking up at her was a gift in itself. “How are you feeling, my heart? Do you want some water?” She asked as she reached for the squat glass that sat by the bed. “Come on, Sweetheart, there you go.” She carefully helped him drink before setting the glass back down. “There’s my boy.”

He buried his face in the palm of her hand and snuffled at her wrist, pulling in a deep lungful of her perfume. His cheek was still warm, warmer than it should be, and he sniffled miserably.

“Mama, I don’t feel good,” he mumbled, eyes screwed shut. “It hurts.”

“Where does it hurt, James?”

He curled into a tighter ball and sniffled wetly, his fingers curled loosely around her wrist. “Everywhere,” he blinked, eyes glazed and red, “My mouth hurts..”

Winifred frowned but did her best to sooth the weepy little boy. She stroked his cheeks with careful fingertips and idly wondered if his sickness was being caused by some sort of infection or abscess under his teeth. It was a perfectly logical explanation, wasn’t it? With the utmost care, she felt along his jaw for any signs of tenderness then tipped his head back so she could check his teeth and shushed him when he whimpered. “Mama’s just gonna take a peek into your mouth, ok, Sweetheart? Just a quick look and you can rest some more.”

James sucked in a breath and steeled himself, visibly trying not to cry. He gave a loud, wet sniffle and nodded. “… ‘kay.” He opened his mouth as far as it would go, which really wasn’t far, and Winifred praised him absently as she peered inside.

Lord, she hoped it wasn’t an abscess; she wasn’t sure they had the money for an emergency trip to the dentist nor the hospital. They’d already had to spend more money than they could really afford, what with the house call from the doctor and the pain medicine and the new pillows.. She didn’t begrudge spending the money on James at all, but if they needed to take him to the hospital it was certainly going to make things tight for more than a little while.

George was already working overtime down at the docks, as it was.

“Hey, come on, my heart,” she cooed, “Can you open up a little bit more? Just a little,” his jaw opened a little further and he choked back a sob, heavy tears rolling down his cheeks as she tilted his head toward the window to get some more light. “There we go, Baby. There we-”

She paused, blinked twice and peered deeper into his mouth with wide, startled eyes. Yes, she was expecting to see a mouth full of teeth when she looked inside, but she certainly wasn’t expecting to see _teeth_. He had long lost the majority of his baby teeth and the new ones had grown through just fine, but where she’d expected to see the row of blunt, white teeth, the sharpest being his incisors, instead she found herself looking at two rows of elongated sharp teeth.

Teeth that weren’t _human_.

Her sharp gasp was loud and James flinched, glassy eyes blinking open as his fingers flexed around her wrist.

“Mama?” He licked at his dry, chapped lips and looked up at her, frightened. “Mama, you’re all white… What’s wrong? Did I get you sick, too?”

Winifred blinked rapidly and shook her head. “No, Honey, no,” she reassured him as she stroked his hair, her mind racing. He had a mouth full of sharp, _very sharp_ , teeth that looked more like they belonged to some kind of animal than they did to her very small, very ill, very _human_ , baby boy. She’d never seen anything like it; not outside of a picture book anyway.

“James, Baby,” she hedged, a deep buried suspicion starting to surface. When she and George had first married, he had told her a story that had been passed through his family from generation to generation. A story that she had, at the time, laughed off as whimsey and nonsense. No, she thought, no it couldn’t be… Those were just stories that George’s mother was told by her mother and her mother before that. There was no way that- “Honey, where else does it hurt? Can you show me?”

She watched him flex his wrists, ankles and knees, then hold out his fingers for her to inspect.

“It _all_ hurts.”

She glanced from his face to his fingers and gingerly picked up his hand to look. His skin was warm but the joints of each finger, knuckle and his wrists were even warmer, the skin an angry red. They were hot and swollen and if she didn’t know any better, she’d say they looked just a little bit misshapen. She ran the pad of her index finger across his knuckle and flinched violently when it moved under the pressure of her touch, the shape of the bones twisting before her eyes. James let out a pained whine and she looked at him, terrified, then back to his hands.

“Baby,” she started, her voice as level as she could manage, “Is this the first time this has happened? Have your hands ever done this before today?” She stroked his forehead and lifted his eyelids slightly to look at his pale eyes properly. “Have you felt sick like this before?” At his slightly guilty look, Winifred sighed and ran her thumb underneath his eye. His face was already beginning to lose some of its baby fat and the cheekbones he had hiding under there were gorgeous; her boy was going to be a looker, just like his father. He was already a mirror (albeit smaller) image of his dear old dad (the only thing James had inherited from her was his eye color, a pale blue so muted that it appeared gray). Unfortunately, though, he also had his father’s questionable habit of hiding when he was poorly or injured. It seemed that their stubbornness was genetic. “James, you’re not in trouble, you just need to tell me if this is the first time you haven’t felt very good or if you just didn’t tell us last time.”

He fidgeted with the thin band of gold around her finger and chewed on his lip, cheeks ablaze with fever. Sweat was beginning to bead on his brow again. “I felt bad a while ago,” he admitted finally, “I got real dizzy and slipped on the stairs because my head hurt.” He looked up at her from under his lashes, “… then I got real hot and sweaty and I threw up.”

Her heart broke with the knowledge that he’d been unwell but too afraid to tell them.

“Oh, James,” she sighed, mouth pulled down in a frown. She tucked herself in beside him on the bed, gathered him up in her arms and pressed her lips against his hair. He burrowed into her, head buried in her neck and she took a moment to relish the contact; he was at that awkward age where hugging his mother was embarrassing and he’d brush off her affection with a whine, so the fact that he was so willing to cuddle with her was telling. “Sweetheart, why didn’t you tell us? You know we wouldn’t have been mad; you can’t help being sick.”

His fingers clenched in the fabric of her dress and he shrugged helplessly against her. “Didn’t wanna bother you or nothin’,” he said, eyes downcast and sullen.

Winifred closed her eyes and ran her fingers through his hair once, twice, then paused. Was his hair always this thick, she wondered as she pulled back to look at the shaggy, dark brown mop on his head. Yes, James had always had a healthy head of hair (again, thank you, George) but it had never been this thick before.. In fact, it hadn’t even felt this thick the day before last when she’d made a sad attempt at combing it whilst he was sleeping.

There was something strange going on and the more she thought about it, the more she found herself growing nervous.

When she had married George Barnes and they were still within their first few weeks of being newlyweds, they’d laid on a blanket on the roof of their tenement with their heads bent together and fingers tangled, stargazing, and he’d told her a story.

A story that had been passed down through his family that told of a small group of men, four, so the tale went, that years upon years ago had stumbled across a young woman being harassed by a drunkard in the dead of night.

A story where the group of four men had come to the aid of a battered and bruised, waifish blonde young woman who wasn’t really a young woman at all, but instead a motherly, dark haired goddess in disguise.

It was a story of four men whose courage and honor on that dark night, somewhere on the backroads of a village across the sea, were granted a boon from the Gods of Old. It was a gift that aided and allowed them to guard and protect their own, bloodlines forever changed.

The blessing was to be passed from son to son, generation to generation, but through the years the blood had thinned and the magic that had nurtured the gift had faded away to become little more than a hushed folktale that was whispered around the fire at night.

When George had told her the family’s deep, dark secret Winifred had laughed, but the glimmer of hurt in his eyes had quickly silenced her mirth; this was something that meant a lot to him and her disbelief had hurt him. She’d offered him a subdued apology and made a promise to herself right then and there to leave it alone, that she would never again mock him for his family’s beliefs.

Winifred looked down at the top of her little boy’s head and ran her fingers through his soft, thick hair and stroked the back of his neck, scratching his scalp lightly with her fingernails as she wondered.

Maybe the stories weren’t just some fantastical tale that had been whispered through the generations.

 _Maybe_ there was some truth to them and maybe, just _maybe_ , her James was the first in generations who had been born with-

No.

 _No_ , she was being ridiculous. The Old Gods were just a myth and there was no such thing as a man who could become a beast at will. She was just being a silly woman with an overactive imagination who was desperately worried for her child and grasping at straws for an explanation..

_But then.._

The teeth she had literally just seen in James’s mouth were _not_ human; they definitely looked like they belonged to some sort of animal and his hair _was_ thicker than it had been a week earlier, which was curious. There was also the not-so-insignificant matter of his knuckles deforming under her own fingers as she was holding his hand.

_Oh._

_Oh no._

“… George?” She called, wide eyes fixed on her son. A moment passed and when no response came she called for him again, more insistent this time. _“George?!”_ James whined into her neck, hands over his ears and cringing from the volume of her shouting by his ear. Winifred immediately felt awful and hurried to sooth him. “Shh, I’m sorry,” she hushed, rocking him. There was a muted thump from the other room followed by rapid, heavy footsteps. “Mama’s sorry, honey.. I shouldn’t have yelled in your ear.” She stroked his ear and dotted a kiss against his forehead, her chest tight at the sound of his sniffling. “It’s ok, you’re ok..” She cupped her hand over his ear and called for her husband once more but the bedroom door swung open with a bang before she’d even finished calling his name.

He tripped into the room, boots unlaced but still on his feet and cheeks still smudged with work-related grime. He looked down at her, green eyes frantic, his face pale and sleep-rumpled. He must have fallen asleep almost immediately after he’d walked through the door, she mused, probably in the process of removing his boots. “What is it? What happened? Is he awake? Oh god, he’s not dead, is he?! Tell me he aint dead!”

Winifred blinked at the series of rapid-fire questions and pointedly looked down at the top of James’s dark head. His eyes were barely even open, but what was visible of them gleamed silver in the light from the window and he curled into her even more. He was shivering and his hands were shaking, fingernails curled painfully into his palms.

When George saw that James was awake his shoulders sagged with relief and he swept his hands through his already messy hair. He’d obviously been running his fingers through it, something he did when he was anxious, and a stray lock fell over his brow. He took a deep breath and moved to sit in the chair by the bed, the same place she’d been perched not long before and touched his knuckles to the apple of James’s cheek. He gave him a tired smile and laid his palm against the side of the boy’s neck. “Hey, kiddo,” he glanced at his wife, brows tight with worry when he felt the heat under his hand, “You gave us quite the scare.” He told him in a low murmur.

James wriggled out of Winifred’s arms and into his father’s lap. “M’sorry.” He whispered.

“Nothin’ to be sorry about,” George curled around him and tucked him underneath his chin. “Just glad you’re awake. How you feelin?” He asked as he absently rocked him back and forth, just like he would when he was a babe.

James shrugged mutely and Winifred lifted her chin to get George’s attention.

“His teeth, George,” she murmured, calm as you like. He looked back at her, confused. “Look at his teeth.”

He frowned at her but did as he was told (he was smart enough to know not to question his wife) and carefully nudged the boy’s chin up to look inside his mouth. His eyes widened after a moment and he gave her a sharp look, then ducked his head to look again. After a moment of stunned silence he breathed out a hushed “Well I’ll be damned..”

** 2016**

Darcy watched from their bed, chewing her thumbnail as Steve shoved a couple of the spare compression shirts that he wore underneath his suit into a nondescript black duffle bag. He glanced around the room with a harried look on his face and turned in a circle, jaw clenched tight as he tossed pillow after pillow aside muttering to himself.

“Have you seen my--”

She held up the two pairs of socks that he had asked her to hold for him so he wouldn’t lose them two minutes ago.

_Literally._

Two whole minutes.

“Here.” She waved the ever-elusive socks at him and grumbled half-heartedly when he cupped the back of her head in his hand and dropped a kiss against her temple.

“You’re a life saver, Darce,” he mumbled against her skin as he plucked them from her fingers then dropped to his knees and crawled halfway underneath the bed to retrieve his shield. One would think that he would keep it carefully set aside or stored somewhere safe but no, he was always leaving that giant bastard frisbee in the most inconvenient of places and it irked the shit out of her.

She’d tripped over it twice last night on her way to the bathroom, and when she’d almost fallen on her ass a third time, her irritated string of profanity had cowed him into sheepishly pushing it under the bed so it was out of the way. She almost, _almost_ , felt guilty for swearing up a storm at him for leaving his shit all over the place.

But she didn’t.

She didn’t feel guilty about it (ok, maybe just a _little_ bit guilty) because if she hadn’t cussed him out about leaving his stuff in the way she wouldn’t be in the position to appreciate the glory that was her current view; Captain America, ass up in the air in nothing but his under armor shirt, bright purple boxer briefs and his mismatched socks. One had neon green and hot pink stripes and the other one had little yellow French bulldogs on a bright blue background.

They were beautiful. Honest.

He was wedged under the bed muttering all kinds of colorful profanities that would make even Tony Stark himself bluster and blush.

Looking at that butt sticking up in the air made her want to break out into a rousing rendition of the national anthem, although her version had less to do with flags and more to do with the beauty that was that ass… Or as she quietly referred to it in her head, the _Star Spangled Backside._

“How long do you think you’ll be gone?” She asked, peering over the edge of the bed as he tried to wriggle and shuffle his way back out. His boxers crept up his thighs to expose the firm, rounded curve of his butt-cheek and her eyebrows flicked up appreciatively. She leered at him, lip between her teeth and she leaned forward, one hundred percent unashamed and slapped him on the ass. His foot jerked and he let out a very unmanly yelp before he cleared his throat beneath the bed and Darcy let out a gleeful cackle. To hell with objectification being inappropriate blah-blah-blah, he was her boyfriend and if she wanted to touch his butt (which was a very, _very_ attractive butt, thank you very much – People magazine agreed with her – _as they should_ ), she was _going_ to touch his butt, damn it. It’s not like _he_ had any complaints about it. “I can see your pink bits, Steve.” She pointed out with a small grin.

His voice was muffled and he continued to shuffle his way backwards. “You can see my what? What does that even-” there was a solid clunk and the bedframe shook from the force of impact. “ _Motherfu_ \-- **_Ow_** _!_ What the hell are my pink bits and whose brilliant idea was it to put this thing under here anyway??” He snapped. “ _And why the **fuck** are beds so low to the ground these days?!_”

Darcy snorted into her hand and tried not to laugh aloud. Well, she tried not to laugh _too_ loud, anyway.

“I seem to recall it being yours, Captain Underpants,” she teased as he finally managed to free himself from the scary world of _‘Under The Bed’_. “And your _‘pink bits’_ are your ass. I can see your very pale, patriotic _ass,_ Steve. As much as I love to look at it and as much as I’d like it to see it recognized as a national treasure, put it away, Princess Peach. Cover it up before somebody mistakes your butt crack for an ATM slot.” She sniggered openly when he made a sound of incredulity followed by a string of grumbled curse words. Gods, she adored this man. “ _Why are beds so low to the ground these days._. You’re such an old man. Maybe they _were_ as low then as they are now but you never noticed because you weren’t the size of a moose back then!” She deepened her voice and adopted a grumpy frown. “Why, back in _my_ day…” She mocked.

His face was flushed from getting stuck under the bed and his hair a scruffy mess, dark blonde strands sticking up all over the place. His jaw was dark with a couple of days worth of stubble.

He hadn’t been awake for long when Natasha had knocked on their door with a spur of the moment, top secret assignment. It was one of those rare mornings that her beloved had actually stayed in bed after sunrise, luxuriating like a sloth, so he was still all soft and sleepy when their resident sneaky-sneak-who sneaked let herself in and walked right into their bedroom uninvited. He wasn’t asleep for long after that. He was wide awake _now,_ but he still had a pillow crease on his right cheek.

“M'not a moose.”

Darcy didn’t even bother to resist the urge to laugh at the disgruntled glower he was giving her as he climbed to his feet, one hand on the bed, his shield in the other.

“You’re a pain in the ass, you know,” he sniffed at her and tried to discreetly adjust his underwear with little success. He rolled his eyes at her giggle-snort and gave up all pretense of subtlety, tugged his boxers back into place and with a shameless wiggle of his hips, cheerfully flipped her off.

“Oh, I know,” she nodded sagely. “My mother told me so at least twice a day, _every_ day until I moved away to college. Not only am I competent, but I am in fact _fluent_ in assholery.”

He hummed and dipped down to kiss her again, his shield hooked over one arm and his bag on the bed beside her. “ _Assholery_ isn’t a real word and even if it was, I’m pretty sure it’s not something you could be fluent in,” he mumbled against her lips with a smirk. “Darcy, stop trying to make _assholery_ happen _. It’s not going to happen!_ ”

Darcy let out a loud bark of delighted laughter, took his face in her hands and pressed a loud, smacking kiss to his mouth. He tasted like peppermint toothpaste and she licked her lips to chase the cool, clean flavor of him. The smile on her face was so bright that it could probably be seen from Asgard.

What was she thinking? _Of course_ it could be seen from Asgard; Heimdall saw everything, after all.

(Now that she thought about it, if Heimdall could in fact see everything within the nine realms, did that make him a voyeur of epic proportions or did he turn a blind eye to people while they were doing the do? She’d have to have a pow-wow with Thor about it next time he was planet-side.)

“Was that a thinly veiled Mean Girls reference, Steve? Holy shit, that was a Mean Girls reference, wasn’t it!” She giggled and stroked her thumbs over the curve of his jaw, her eyes soft with affection. “Oh my God, you’re _such_ a troll, it’s amazing.” She grinned up at him as he shrugged unrepentantly then watched him foist his bag over his shoulder. “I really fucking love you, you know.”

He beamed at her and bent to pick up his boots. He’d probably put those on in the jet once they were in the air. “I really fucking love you too,” he replied as he turned towards the door. “And yes, I am.” He stopped after a few steps and shot her an apologetic smile. “I’m not exactly sure when I’ll be back yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do. Even if we’re already in the air on the way home, I’ll call you, alright?”

He always worried when he was unable to give her a concrete timescale for missions; he hated leaving without being able to tell her when he’d be back. He didn’t like the idea of her being kept in the dark, not knowing when he’d be home or if he was even coming home at all.

He worried too much. Hell, he worried enough for the both of them most of the time.

“Ok,” She hugged her knees to her chest and watched him go with an uncomfortable twist in her stomach. “Be safe.”

Darcy had known Steve for a little over three years, they’d been dating for two and a half and living together for just on twelve months, but watching him walk out the door for an assignment of unknown duration sucked every damn time. She knew what she was getting into when she agreed to that first date with him; Steve was Steve and his job was his job, but that didn’t make her worry any less. She figured she was going to worry about him just as much whether they were dating or not, so what was the difference between friends and lovers?

It was the best decision she’d made in a long time, aside from applying for that internship with Jane, that is. Without _that_ she’d never be _here_.

She liked to think that Steve was _slightly_ less suicidal these days than he was when they’d first met, as well. Well, she hoped he was, anyway.

“Babe?” She called after him, her eyes turned toward the ceiling as he paused by the apartment door.

His voice was distracted and she listened to him run over his last minute checklist of things he needed to take with him with an indulgent smile on her face. She eyed the item on the bed beside her with a smirk.

His voice dipped down low with obvious affection as he drawled out a lazy “ _Yeees_ , my love? My darling, my angel… My pretty, pretty Butterfly??”

She bit her lip and smiled down into her lap, all aflutter. Butterfly, he’d called her. She loved it when he called her that.

“Will you be needing your pants?”

There was a moment of silence then the sound of his heavy sigh made her snort in a very undignified, unladylike manner.

“… _God damn it_.”


	2. Two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, fair warning - this chapter contains graphic and/or disturbing descriptions of torture-related injures and of course, the obvious awareness of said torture itself. I'd like to say that when you get to a certain point you can just skim/skip it, but everything that is in here is an important plot point. Yes, it's unpleasant at times and yes, its sad, but lets be honest.. It's a Winter Soldier/Bucky Barnes angst-fest. Of course it's gonna be sad and hurty.
> 
> There is blood. There is gore. There is an obnoxious Tony Stark, a pissed off Steve Rogers and reference to (mythical) animal abuse. This is your official "Shit's about to get real, people" warning. 
> 
> (also, everybody who is reading/commenting/leaving kudos/bookmarking or subscribing, you're amazing and your continued support makes me all fuzzy inside. Here's to hoping this doesn't disappoint!)

They had been under ground for at least an hour now, maybe more. It was dark and cold, an old fortified bunker from what he could gather, one that frighteningly enough hadn’t shown up on any ground penetrating radar they’d had access to; well, none that they’d had access to before Tony happened, anyway.

If they hadn’t been pointed in the right direction by their source nobody would have been any the wiser about it existing in the first place. It made for a _very_ paranoid Steve.

 _Great_ , he thought, _more secrets. Wonderful._

From the moment the heavy iron doors had creaked open, he’d been unable to shake the strange twist of discomfort in the pit of his stomach. The air inside smelled of damp, moldy rock and there were spots of moss creeping down the walls, down the stairwell and into the dark. It was cold and stale and Steve _did not want to be there_.

He and the other three – Tony, Clint and Natasha – had been working their way deeper and deeper underground in virtual darkness. While Nat and Clint had slunk off into the dark to see what leftover intelligence, if any, they could find, he and Tony methodically cleared each of the three levels, room by room. The further down they went, the worse the smell got and by the time he and Tony had reached the basement level Steve was gagging from the stench. Tony, normally the first person to make some sort of inappropriate joke about dungeons, was uncharacteristically quiet.

Their only light, much to his own displeasure, was coming from Tony’s suit. They weren’t exactly prepared for a fortified underground bunker, but then being prepared wasn’t exactly possible when they’d essentially gone into the mission blind. The information they’d received was from a credible source, someone Clint knew from his early SHIELD days who, for some reason, had a major beef with the organization, but the details were still somewhat vague. All they’d been given were the co-ordinates, that it was a defunct weapons testing facility that had suspected ties to a certain Nazi terrorist organization that _just would not die_ and most importantly; **_DON'T TELL SHIELD ANYTHING._**

While he admitted that it sounded more than a little bit shady, Clint swore up and down that his source could be trusted, so hush-hush it would be kept.

The place had been active up until recently and from what little they had managed to glean from the intel they’d been provided, it had gone from pulling so much electricity from the local (admittedly small) power grid that the nearby town was averaging three extended power-cuts a week, to a virtual ghost town overnight. The place was literally sapping the power grid dry one day, dead and deserted the next.

Something didn’t feel right about the place, but then nothing about HYDRA ever did.

Steve had taken what he’d _thought_ would be a one-way nosedive into the ocean attempting to eradicate those assholes from the world. For him to wake up in the twenty first century only to discover that he’d been less than successful, to find out that he had failed quite so spectacularly, had been one hell of a kick in the teeth.

It had fucking sucked, to be honest.

He’d been incredibly naïve to assume that taking out Schmidt would put an end to the whole damn lot of those crazies.

Fuck HYDRA.

“You doin’ ok back there, Cap?”

Steve coughed into his shoulder and tried to smother himself with his forearm, eyes watering from the smell of rot and decay. There was something rancid about it that took him back to three unseasonably warm days he and the commandos had spent pinned down in a too-quiet trench with over a dozen other permanently quiet troops.

Belatedly, he realized what the familiar smell was. Death. The place _reeked_ of it. The smell reminded him of necrotic flesh and gangrene, but there was something else, an underlying something that made him think of old blood which in turn brought to mind the scent of damp, musky fur.

He squeezed his eyes shut and willed the thought away, shoved it down and locked it away in a box inside so he could keep putting one foot in front of the other. It wasn’t the time or place to be thinking about that right now.

There wouldn’t be time for it later, either.

If he opened that box… Well, if he opened that box, he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to close it again.

“Come on, Cap, gimme somethin’ to work with here. You still good?”

He hacked into his shoulder one last time and tried to suck in as much air as he could through the fabric of his sleeve without inhaling too much of the stink. He didn’t even want to _think_ about what sort of literal shit he might be dragging into his lungs with every breath.

“Ugh,” he swallowed thickly and tried not to heave again. His stomach was starting to ache from the ongoing effort it took to keep down last night’s dinner. “God, it smells fucking terrible down here.” Honestly, there was disgusting and then there was vile. This was beyond vile. Putrid wasn’t even a strong enough word for it.

The comms unit in his ear crackled, the signal was weakened from being so far underground, but so far, so good. “ _Yeah_ ,” Tony’s reply was long drawn out and dry, “The airborne bacteria levels down here are off the charts. Pretty sure you’d be dead by now if it wasn’t for that wonder-juice you’ve got in your veins.”

Steve barely managed to side-step a murky puddle of something sticky at the last minute and continued to follow the light from Tony’s suit down the corridor, shield at the ready, mouth twisted in a disgusted grimace. There hadn’t been any heat signatures that indicated signs of life so far, just a labyrinth of laboratories and steel-lined cellblocks, some of which had suspicious rust colored stains smeared up the walls.

Cellblocks in a weapons testing facility. Because _of course_ there would be dozens upon dozens of cells in a weapons facility. _Why-the-fuck-not??_

Each cell was fitted with a drain in the center of the room and the smell of stagnant water wafted up through the filthy grates. Each of the cramped spaces had a rusted out bed frame in the corner topped with a sad excuse for a mattress, a filthy metal toilet bolted to the floor in the other and obviously, being so far underground, not a window in sight.

There were old strip lights dotted along the length of the corridor. Some were still fixed in place whilst others hung in pieces from thin rusty chains that looked to have been the only light source in the place. Every single one of them looked as though someone had either ripped them clear off the ceiling or had taken a blunt object to them, broken beyond repair.

The cells were disgusting and inhumane, but then if the intel was solid and the bunker had been occupied by HYDRA, that really wasn’t much of a surprise either.

They’d methodically moved from one filthy cell to the next, clearing their way down the hall.

Finally, once they’d reached the end of the corridor, the heavy-duty bolts and chains on the final door had given them pause. Steve had echoed Tony’s baffled _‘what the fuck?’_.

It had taken a combination of plasma-cutting and brute force to break through the locks.

Once they’d cracked the door and had discovered it was another cell, clearing the room was simple. Dealing with the sudden scent-wave of rotten copper and sick, however, _wasn’t._

Clearing the cell itself was simple, not because the room was empty, but because there was literally nothing else but filth inside.

There’d been no bed, no mattress, no toilet, just an oversized drain that was clogged up with something that looked like dead grass or hair in the middle of the concrete floor. A set of heavy iron manacles were bolted low on the wall and the attached chains had thick, solid links that were spattered with something black and tar-like. Whatever it was on those chains, that caked on blackened goop, it had been littered with dirt and debris with more of the dark, bristly fibers dried into it.

The whole thing felt all kinds of wrong and he _really_ did not like it.

All of it made him feel like there were thousands of tiny insects burrowed underneath his skin, chewing down to the bone. It was uncomfortable and unsettling and the anxiety that being inside that cold, empty room had inspired had made him want to turn on his heel and leave without ever looking back.

Back in the present, Steve was doing his darndest not to stick his foot out to trip Tony up. “Is that why you gave Clint and Natasha respirators before we came down here?” He asked as he tried to distract himself from the mystery that was the giant, empty cell.

Steve was equal parts incredulous and annoyed. “You _knew_ this shithole was going to be this disgusting and you didn’t give me a mask _on purpose_? What the fucking _fuck_ , Tony?!”

Tony flapped a hand at him dismissively. He knew he had because he could see the light from the arc reactor flicker as the shadow of his hand passed in front of it. “I suspected it might be a little gross down here, but I’ve gotta say, I wasn’t anticipating the smell to be quite so… _chunky_.”

There was another crackle over the comms and Natasha’s voice filtered through. They could practically hear the _‘Are you fucking serious right now?’_ in her voice, along with her patented Eyebrow of Disapproval™. “Did you seriously just refer to the smell down here as _‘chunky’_ , Stark?” In the background they could make out Clint’s dry muttered _‘well he’s not wrong’._

“Why yes, oh ‘assistant-slash-imposter’ of mine, I did.” He chirped, the clunk-thump of his metal covered feet resonating down the corridor. “You haven’t seen the stats that JARVIS has been feeding me since we hit the second level,” he snorted, “I’m actually somewhat surprised that Cap’s skin isn’t sloughing away as we speak. It is truly disgus- _oh, what the hell was that?! What the fuck did I just step in?! JARVIS, what did I just step in?!”_

Aside from Tony’s squawking and flapping and the resulting laughter down the comms the place was eerily quiet, but there was a steady drip-drip-drip somewhere in the dark, off to the left. As hard as Steve _tried_ to ignore it, the sound made his skin crawl and his chest tighten. The close, damp air wasn’t helping matters either.

Something didn’t feel right about this place. There was nobody here, no sign of life left behind and if the place had supposedly been some sort of weapons facility, why was there a cellblock? And for that matter, what in the blue _hell_ had they been keeping in that filthy, solitary, steel re-enforced cell?

 _Weapons facility, my ass,_ he thought.

Steve pushed past the sick feeling in his gut and eased along behind Tony. His night vision was better than good, but there was your standard run of the mill darkness and then there was this. He could barely see his own hand in front of his face and the air was stifling and stale.

He felt like he was on the bottom of the ocean again, way down in the deep where there the light couldn’t reach and the only sound to be heard was the creaking of the Valkyrie’s fuselage struggling to remain intact under millions of tons of ocean pressing down on her. He wasn’t afraid of the dark, _or_ the silence, but there was something about this place that was making him antsy.

Why the hell were they even here? What had been left behind that was so important that it warranted dragging them all the way to some unmapped, _barely_ _populated_ island off the coast of _Oregon_ of all places, veiled in covert secrecy?

Damn it, he’d just wanted to spend the day in bed with his girl, maybe eat a truck-load of pizza, anonymously rick-roll Tony some more... Ruined. His plans for the day were _ruined_.

The comms line crackled in his ear and Steve gave himself a mental shake. He was meant to be paying attention. He _needed_ to be paying attention.

“If you knew it was so gross down here, Stark, why didn’t you give Rogers a mask?” Clint asked, a curious metallic clunking sound coming from somewhere in the background as he spoke.

Tony sighed, put upon, and there was a scuffling sound up ahead that was accompanied by twin beams of light in the dark. Steve breathed a quiet sigh of relief and chose to ignore the visible particles of whatever-the-fuck-it-was that floated within the bright torch-lit beams, because they’d finally – _finally –_ caught up with Clint and Natasha.

“Because _science_ , Hawk-ass, _science._ I was curious how long it’d take Ol’ Faithful back here to throw up his own lungs. So far there have been no signs of internal organs and I feel oddly let down. You’re letting me down, Cap,” he insisted. “You’re letting _the_ _team_ down. How could you disappoint us like this?”

“What the hell do you want me to do, Tony?” Steve snapped. His nerves were fraying, and he could feel the grip he had on his temper slipping. He was struggling to keep his shit together. He was thoroughly unnerved by the whole situation but taking it out on the rest of the team was uncalled for; he hated the kind of person that missions like this one turned him into. He clenched and unclenched his fist as Tony continued to needle at him. “Do you _want_ me to throw up all over your suit? _Because I will_. Gleefully. I will stick my fingers down my throat, and I will make myself vomit in each and every one of your filtration ports so all you can smell is day old carbonara and the sour hops that have been marinating in my stomach since yesterday.”

The billionaire gasped theatrically. “You wouldn’t _dare_...”

Steve scowled at him through the darkness, more than aware that Tony would be able to see him clearly thanks to the suit’s night vision capabilities. “Watch me. The smell down here is fucking vile, I feel like shit and I even though I haven’t vomited _yet_ , I’d really, really like to. _Don’t_ fucking push me, Stark.”

“Oh, come on, Cap, it was just a joke!”

“Well it wasn’t funny.”

“Says you.”

“Says- _Damn it, Tony!_ This place is a goddamn biohazard and you’re _still_ acting like an eleven-year-old at a grade-school science fair!”

“First of all, I am thoroughly insulted by your implication that I was still in grade-school when I was eleven,” he sniffed, “God, what kind of uneducated swine do you take me for? And secondly, _Mr. Easy Bake oven, 1942_ , you’re the last person who should be preaching about the evils of science fairs!”

“Guys.” The pair continued to bicker until Natasha’s voice called out to them again, firmer this time and twice as irritated. _“Hey idiots!”_

They fell silent and she quirked her eyebrow at them, unimpressed. Steve was too distracted by the sudden flare of light spilling into the hall to the left of her to even notice her displeasure.

There was a door open and there was a tinny buzz of a flickering strip light coming from inside the room. Clint was already moving through the doorway with his bow drawn, shoulders tense.

He paused part way through and let out a strangled noise that could only be described as startled and or horrified. He lowered his bow an inch, maybe two, and his usual cool façade fell away. “ _What-_ what the _actual_ fuck?”

Natasha followed him inside and she too fell short just inside the door, her entire body going unnaturally still.

“ _What_?” Tony pushed past the pair, forcing them further into the room. “What’s everybody so-” he fell silent and Steve could hear the shocked rasp of his breathing through the comm in his ear. “ _What is,”_ Tony stuttered, “What is that? Somebody tell what _that_ is,” he paused, “-because it can’t possibly be what I _think_ it is.” The rambling continued and the dull ache that had been lurking behind Steve’s temples turned into an outright throb.

 _Tony-fucking-stark_.

“Am I hallucinating? Pinch me. Somebody pinch me because what the fuckity _fuck_ is that doing down here?!”

Steve’s stomach twitched uncomfortably; he wasn’t inside yet so whatever was inside that room was still a mystery to him. What had they stumbled across that would be such a bizarre find in an abandoned HYDRA hidey-hole?

The uneasy swirling in his gut kicked up a notch, straight into outright churning.

“For fuck’s sake, Stark,” the whole damn bunker could hear the eyeroll in Clint’s reply, “No, you’re not hallucinating and stop being so dramatic. As for why it’s here…? Your guess is as good as anybody’s.”

Already inside the room, Natasha eased forward on silent feet. “But _why_ did they leave it here?” She mused aloud. “And what the hell is it doing in a _weapons_ bunker?”

“Come on, Tasha, look at it,” Clint murmured lowly. “It’s here because it’s blatantly obvious that they weren’t just testing weapons here; who knows what else they were using it for.” He pointed out, “-and I’m pretty sure they left it here because it’s _dead_.”

“But _what_ use could they’ve possibly had for it in the first place?”

Steve finally made it through the door, took in the sight before him and the vomit that had been threatening to make an appearance for the past hour started to burn its way up his throat. He hastily slapped a hand over his mouth and nose and desperately tried to swallow it back down.

The room was large, obviously a research lab or improvised infirmary of some sort (judging by the bank of computers and dilapidated medical equipment along the rear wall). It was cleaner than most of the other rooms they’d been through (but not by much) and set against the far wall, secured in place by a series of huge rusted-out bolts and brackets, was a large open barred cage. The bars were crooked and uneven, certainly not professionally fabricated; it had obviously been made in haste as a last-minute addition.

Inside said cage were the remains of a large bear - a brown bear that was so far past large that it had completely bypassed giant and was bordering on massive despite its poor state. It was sprawled on its left side with a thick, heavy chain (identical to the one he and Tony had previously come across a level up) shackled to its rear left leg. The chain looked like it had been there for some time; the ankle cuff was cinched so tight and dug in so far into the animal’s leg that the wrecked flesh around it had begun to swallow up the metal. The bear’s fur was brittle and dry and matted with something that couldn’t be anything other than rancid blood. It was so emaciated that he could see each of the fist-sized vertebrae that made up its oversized spine and the sickening jut of its hip bones that should have been covered in a dense layer of fat and muscle.

A length of thick barbed wire that had been crudely fashioned into a muzzle was wrapped around its face, binding the poor thing’s mouth shut. Whatever end the animal found, Steve thought sadly, it had been neither pleasant nor painless.

He’d seen bears before, plenty of them, but he hadn’t seen one this large in _years_ … So many, many years and the memory of the last time he _had_ made his throat shrink closed and his eyes sting.

Steve stared, rooted to the spot. He was going to be sick. God, he’d lasted this long without anything actually leaving his mouth, but Jesus H. Christ, now he was _definitely_ going to be sick.

Clint lingered in the doorway, eyeing the animal cautiously. He edged closer and lowered his bow, arrow still knocked at the ready, just in case. “Roughly how long do you think it’s been dead?”

The longer Steve stared at the caged animal the more unsettled he felt and he couldn’t bring himself to look away. There was something off about it, a heavy sickness in his stomach that only got worse the longer he kept his eyes on the animal inside the cage. Anxiety started to gnaw at his insides and he swallowed thickly again, acid burning at the back of his throat.

It was only because he was staring quite so intently that he even noticed the barely-there way that the bear’s chest expanded slightly. There was a weak tick in the muscle beneath its jaw, like it was trying to swallow but couldn’t.

It took him three attempts to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth and when he finally did, his voice came out in a scratchy rasp.

“It’s not dead.” He said numbly. “It- _it’s not dead_.” He repeated, louder this time.

All the other eyes in the room turned toward him as he took a series of stumbling, clumsy steps closer to the cage.

The steel structure itself was large, yes, but nowhere near large enough for the bear to be able to have any sort of room to turn around, let alone move at all, and the massive beast was crammed inside with little regard for its comfort or wellbeing. The bars on top were too low for it to stand on all fours and the space was barely wide enough for it to lay down. As it was, the animal’s legs were either curled tight against its body or pinned underneath it and its rear right paw was three quarters of the way through the bars, wedged at what looked to be an immensely painful, unnatural angle.

Steve distantly registered the sound of Tony’s voice behind him using the tech in his suit to confirm what he himself already knew, but everything else faded to a dull hum as he drew closer and closer to the cage and the animal within.

Up close the bear’s size was even more immense than it appeared to be from the doorway; it had obviously been starved and only looked smaller from a distance because of the distinct lack of bulk, muscle mass gone to waste. There was no way of telling how large it really was without getting it out of the cage, but he suspected that at full health it would be huge. Steve clenched his jaw so hard that the mandible joint popped painfully beneath his ear, sickened by the cruelty it must have endured.

A buried memory (one that he told himself was way down deep so he could avoid thinking about it, but not really) dug its way closer and closer to the surface and the sharp, burning ache in his sinuses and behind his ribs that accompanied it made his breath catch.

Even being in some dank underground cesspool, Steve could feel the ghost of cold wind biting into his cheeks and he could hear the muffled thump of huge, heavy feet on snow, the ragged snorting-huff of the animal gaining on him before the pursuit came to an end with a scream and loud peals of laughter. He remembered (well) over a ton of predator slamming into him before they’d tumbled down a steep embankment into the deep snowdrift at the bottom...

The memory was _warmth_ and _happiness_ and _home_.

God, that was probably the only time he could remember where Austria and snow could be associated with a happy memory.

“-practically dead anyway. We should probably put it out of its misery; it’d be kinder.”

Tony grudgingly agreed with the others before he absently made comment that he’d never seen a Kodiak bear that big before and Steve’s heart promptly attempted to break its way clear out of his chest.

His shield clattered to the floor with a loud, metallic clang.

He struggled to breathe and reached blindly for something to grab hold of when he stumbled, fingers catching on roughened metal. His foot bumped against the bottom of the cage, but he was so dizzy with horror that he missed the way that the animal inside flinched when it felt the vibration travel along the bars.

“Shit, Steve! Are you alright? You nearly fell on your ass just no—”

 _“What did you say?”_ He croaked, eyes wide and face pale before turning his gaze back to matted fur and a cracked, dry nose. His eyes fell on the shackled back leg and his stomach soured when he looked a little closer and he could see that an obvious attempt to chew itself free had been made at some point, the dark brown of its coat patchy with gnarled, poorly healed skin underneath.

The others shared a look and Tony’s reply was stilted and confused. “You… nearly fell on your—?"

“No!” He interrupted with a wave of his hand. The fingers of the other one, the hand holding onto the bars of the cage, wrung tighter around the metal and the others watched him cling to it, concerned. They’d never seen him so ruffled. “No, not that, _the other thing_... Before that.”

He looked through the bars and his memory helped him fill in the gaps, how the animal would look if it had been properly fed and cared for, how its chocolate brown coat would look if it were glossy and plush. He thought about the sheer size it _should’ve_ been and how it _should’ve_ looked with its belly filled out and fat after gorging on a deer caught the night before, _but didn’t_ …

Steve’s heart began to hammer in his chest so hard that he could feel it in his throat and the strange, unsettled feeling from before twisted into suspicion that quickly morphed into a sudden sickening realization when the bear shifted ever so slightly and exposed its front left paw. It had been tucked underneath its body before, but now that it was visible he was able to make out cracked and yellowing claws that were meant to be pearly white and almost four inches in length and the pale silver dapple that ran through otherwise dark fur that he knew _deep in his bones_ would climb all the way to the shoulder.

It was with dawning horror that he realized that he _recognized_ those silver splodges. He _knew_ every shape and whirl of those splodges because he’d seen them almost _every damn day_ of his life between the ages of eleven and twenty-one, then again from twenty-three to twenty-six. The pale silver was easily identifiable and Jesus fuck, he’d seen it before. He’d studied the shape of it with his eyes and traced it with his fingers. When the weather turned bad and he shook so hard that his jaw ached and his bones seemingly rattled, he’d buried his fingers deep into the pile of it to keep warm.

He fucking _knew_ those markings.

 _God_ , he thought as his vision hazed and his lungs seized, _oh God, please don’t be- how could he have been so fucking stupid? How could he have assumed_ \--

If he thought he _might_ throw up before, now it was just a matter of _when_.

How the hell didn’t he recognize it earlier?? How the actual fuck did he miss it?!

Natasha and Clint shared a look, one that Steve was unable to decipher, and Tony repeated himself. Again.

“… I’ve never seen a Kodiak bear that big before?”

All the air rushed out of his lungs and Steve stumbled to his knees beside the cage with chant of ‘no no no no’ that started slow and quickly turned frantic as he pushed his hands through the bars towards the barely breathing, potentially dying, animal. “No,” he repeated, voice strangled and thick, “No, please no… _Please, God, no_...” Hands pulled at his shoulders and tried to drag him backwards, away from the cage and free from apparent danger. “No, don’t – _let me go!_ ” He threw his elbow back to shake free of grabbing hands without a second thought.

There was a winded ‘oof’ behind him and the scuffle of feet over concrete then a snarled curse in Russian.

Natasha.

He’d just elbowed Natasha in the sternum but he was numb to it, already too frantic to feel guilty.

“Damn it, Steve, are you trying to get yourself killed?!” She rasped, still pulling at him despite being winded. “You can’t just stick your hands into a bear cage, you idiot! That’s a wild animal and as sick as it is, it could still rip your goddamn arm off!”

“ _He’s not a wild animal!_ ” He roared. The room fell quiet as he knelt by the cage, chest heaving and face pale. His lip trembled and he swallowed thickly, mouth twisting in distress. “He’s not an animal.” He croaked and the fight left him.

The others fell quiet and stilled as they watched him reach through to bury his fingers in the thick, matted ruff around the bear’s neck.

Its big chest lifted and fell, a horrible wet rattle coming from its lungs and Steve felt his way up its broad neck to where there was a collar hidden amongst the fur. He skimmed his fingers around the surface, couldn’t find any joins in the metal then tugged at it and let out a short sob when it wouldn’t budge. He tried to get closer but couldn’t, so he pushed up against the bars with his arms threaded through the gaps and grabbed hold of what he could reach.

He carefully thumbed a heavy eyelid open and peered at the pale gray underneath. A fresh wave of nausea washed over him hot and hard when a silent, rumbling groan passed through bound lips and sharp teeth. “I’m sorry,” he sniffed into his shoulder, devastated and ran his hands over fur that was crusted up with god knows what. Fur that should have been thick and velvety, glossy with health. “I thought-” he took a shaky breath that dissolved into a sob, “I should have gone back...” he sniffled violently and wiped his nose against his sleeve before he pushed his hands back through the bars with a miserable cough, fingers curled into fur. “They told me I- why didn’t I just go anyway?” He wondered aloud, rocking closer. “ _God, I’m so sorry_ … _Forgive me_ ,” he swallowed, hands shaking, _“Please, I know I don’t deserve it but, god, please forgive me...”_

Lungs rattled and he could hear the fluid gathering in them with each labored breath; how could he have even _dared_ to assume that he would…

God, this was all his fault.

He should have gone _back_ instead of rolling over like a stray, wallowing in his own misery. He should have _gone back_.

“… Cap?” Came Tony’s concerned and confused voice from behind him. “Uh, Cap, buddy… You wanna fill in the rest of the class? What’s goin’ on here?”

There was a long moment where all he could do was stare at the miniscule slits of the bear’s eyes; the sliver of pale gray was barely visible, but the gleam he could see was cloudy with pain. Another shallow, shuddering breath was dragged in, much weaker than it should have been, barely hanging on.

Steve stroked his fingers carefully over the wire-wrapped muzzle and dropped his forehead against the cold, iron bars. “He’s not an animal,” he told them again, his chest tight and hot, stomach roiling with nausea. “He’s not an animal, because he’s Bucky.”

**

There was a moment of stunned silence before Tony cleared his throat.

“Bucky.” He parroted in disbelief, “As in Bucky _‘your best friend from the forties who took a swan dive out the side of a train in the Alps’_ Barnes?”

Steve didn’t look up, too busy stroking his thumbs across the bear’s brow. “Yes,” his reply was quiet, mournful. “That Bucky.”

“I’m sorry,” Tony huffed in disbelief, “I could have sworn that Bucky Barnes was, you know, _human_. As in _not a bear_. I’m a little hazy on the _conversations_ I had with dear old dad, few of them that there were, but I’m fairly certain that I would remember him mentioning that Barnes was Yogi Bear’s distant cousin!”

“Howard didn’t know!” Steve snarled, glaring up at the bewildered billionaire. He looked back into the cage and his voice lowered and grew despondent. “ _Nobody_ knew. Nobody but his family… And me.”

There was a beat of silence and then Clint, of all people, took a step closer, his eyes tight with concern. “Steve,” he started, hesitating more than once before he went on, “I’m not saying that you aren’t telling the truth, I’m not, but even you have to realize how crazy this sounds, right?” The shuffle of his feet grew closer and Steve tensed, but didn’t look at him.

“I know it sounds crazy,” he said quietly, “I do, but I don’t care whether you believe me or not.” He stroked long, gentle strokes from between ‘Bucky’s’ eyes and over the top of his head, “I know my b-,” he stopped short, “I know my best friend and I know that this is him. I’d know his markings anywhere.”

“If you’d know them anywhere,” Tony interrupted, dubious about the whole situation, “-then why didn’t you know it was him as soon as you walked through that door? Why did it take you so long to recognize him, huh?”

 _“Tony.”_ Natasha snarled sharply. “Stop being an asshole.”

It was hard to figure out what Tony was thinking from his expression, the faceplate on his suit was still down for obvious reasons, but the sheer incredulity in his voice was impossible to miss. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he sniped, “Cap here insists that the virtually dead circus animal in the cage is his long dead best friend and you’re _not_ prepared to call bullshit?! Well, _you_ might not be, but _I am_ ,” he turned back to Steve, still bent over his apparent-friend. “This is bullshit, Steve. _Absolute bullshit_. Are you seriously trying to say that Bucky Barnes is some sort of were-animal? You do know that werewolves, or _bears_ , as the case may be, _do not exist_ , right?” He spat. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the cage. “That? _That is a bear_. It is a very, very _sick_ bear that needs to be put out of its misery!”

The look Steve threw him was one that the rest of them had only seen once before, and that was when Darcy had been roofied in a bar and he’d caught the piece of shit trying to quietly coax her out the door. He’d been fucking livid and ready to tear the guy apart with his bare hands; it had taken some creative measures to keep him from doing so.

It turned out that’d been the kick in the butt they’d both needed and not long after that debacle he and Darcy had finally gotten their shit together and started dating.

That particular look was one that Tony hadn’t _ever_ wanted to be on the receiving end of, but apparently, he’d just stepped clear over an invisible line. Despite all his bravado and the metal suit that he was wrapped in, he still had to force himself to plant his feet.

Sensing that things were about to escalate and get ugly, Natasha smoothly inserted herself into the conversation and moved to stand by Clint. He was peering over Steve’s shoulder into the cage with a thoughtful furrow to his eyebrows.

“What is it?” She asked, looking from her partner to the bear he was visibly studying, then back again. “I know that look,” she observed. “Tell me.”

Clint clicked his tongue and scratched at the exposed part of his jaw absently. “You know I grew up in a circus, right?” He mused, a pointed look aimed toward Tony, who despite being completely encased within the Iron Man suit, looked suitably cowed. His earlier circus comment had been unnecessary. “In all my time spent around animals like this, smaller brown bears, black bears, even one or two Kodiaks like this guy,” his brow creased, “-although I’m sure I haven’t ever seen one quite _this_ big,” he mused with a thoughtful, quirked eyebrow, “Tasha… I have _never_ come across one with eyes that color.”

Tony spluttered, indignant, but he went largely ignored and Natasha bent to look for herself, her eyes softening ever so slightly at Steve when he obligingly eased the heavy eyelid open again.

A silvery gray eye stared back at her blindly, pale as a snow cloud in the winter and dull with pain.

“Huh.” She watched the way Steve’s hands carefully worked through thick, tangled fur, gentle as can be and took in the look on his face, soft despite his glassy, bloodshot eyes. Even if she wasn’t exactly sold on the idea that this bear might be his long lost childhood friend (whom she had always suspected was more than _just_ a friend), she knew for a fact that Steve believed it was and if Steve was so sure, then she was willing to entertain the idea. Hell, she’d seen weirder things.

A legitimate alien God.

A super soldier from the forties, thought dead, found frozen solid (in a coma he would soon wake from) somewhere in the Arctic in the plane he’d crashed seventy years earlier.

A billionaire that flew around in a glorified tin can.

_Weirder._

“ _Oh, for the love of_ \- you two can’t honestly be contemplating-”

She cut him off mid-sentence. “What harm in it is there, Tony?” She asked evenly, brow raised in question. “If we get him out and it turns out that he _is_ just a bear, then he’s just a bear. No harm done.” He audibly took a breath over the comms and she hurried to interrupt again. “If he _is_ Barnes,” she continued deliberately, “-can you honestly say you’d be ok with leaving him here? Look at him, Tony… And even if he _is_ just an abnormally large bear, if we didn’t try to help him, would you honestly be able to live with yourself knowing that you didn’t even try to help when you had the means to?”

A glance back toward Steve and Clint saw the archer kneeling to the left of the super-soldier in silent support, worried but cautious, with his hands carefully tucked out of the way under his thighs. Whatever or whomever it was in that cage, Barnes or not, his odds didn’t look good.

“Tony,” she wasn’t pleading, because pleading wasn’t something Natasha Romanov did, but she tried to reason with him. It was hard to miss the hitch in the super-soldier’s breathing when she went on, “He’s dying, Tony. We can’t leave him here.” She eyed him sternly, silently daring him to argue with her. “We are _not_ leaving him here to die and that’s final. Even if the furthest we can get him is outside so he can breathe in fresh air for a few minutes, we’re getting him out. If you’re not going to help, you can go wait by the jet; we’ll do it without you.”

There was a long minute of silence, fraught with tension. For a split-second Natasha considered that Tony was going to dig his heels in and refuse just for the sake of being stubborn, but then he let out a gusty sigh and swore under his breath and Natasha suppressed a smug grin. Victory.

“We’re really doing this?” He asked, resigned. When the three all looked at him, stubborn and silent, he groaned to himself. “God,” he muttered, “fine. _Fine,_ we’ll get him out of there,” he told them, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you when he tries to eat one of you!”

“Technically you haven’t said that at all,” Clint pointed out helpfully and Steve let out a watery snort.

“He’s got a point, Tony,” he agreed. “I know I’m old, and you know how your hearing gets when you’re elderly, but I never heard you mention the potential loss of limbs.”

“Oh, shut your fucking mouth, Rogers,” he sighed, already moving to inspect the shoddy welds holding the bars together that, upon closer inspection, weren’t _actually_ that shoddy. “Right, someone start looking for a lock or latch or something that’ll open this damn thing up.”

Generally, getting as close as the four of them were to a bear as big as this one, let alone any bear, was ill-advised, but he was in such a state that he couldn’t have taken a swipe at them even if he’d wanted to. Hell, he was barely even conscious and remained unresponsive to any of them bar Steve; every time the blond would stop to stroke him or talk to him in a low, soothing voice he’d let out a barely discernable huff, nose flaring and twitching with every pass of Steve’s wrist by his face.

It took a moment for them to register what was happening; _he was scenting him._

Barnes or not, the bear was responding to Steve and if that was going to make things go a little smoother, then they’d take it.

After a ridiculous amount of time spent searching for some sort of opening to the cage, a latch or seam that indicated a hidden join, _anything_ , Stark let out a disgruntled curse and waved everybody back. “Why the hell didn’t I think of this before?” He muttered to himself under his breath, “Right, JARVIS give me a read on this thing. I want to know where the opening is, what it’s made of, anything and everything you can tell me. Oh, and while you’re at it,” he added, making it seem like an afterthought, “give me some read-outs on our furry friend. I want to know what we’re working with here.”

It took mere seconds for JARVIS to complete the necessary scans and all of them heard his reply clear as day over their comms. The AI sounded perturbed by his findings.

“The occupant inside the cage appears to be a large male Kodiak bear. He meets visual requirements, however there are a number of irregularities that suggest that _might_ not be one hundred percent accurate. Whilst the individual inside the cage _appears_ to be a large mammal, I am somewhat uncomfortable confirming nor denying any such thing.”

“ _Irregularities_?” Tony parroted, bemused. “And what do you mean ‘ _appears’_ to be a large mammal? What is that supposed to mean; he _appears_ to be a large mammal?”

“As previously stated, Sir, the individual meets visual criteria. He may _look_ like bear, though taking bone density and physiology into account, I am only eighty percent confident in stating so.”

“Eighty percent? Since when are you only eighty percent sure about something??”

The droll reply prompted a series of muffled sniggering and indignant blustering from said billionaire. “My sincerest apologies, Sir. Would you prefer it to be twelve percent?”

“ _How very dare_ -“ Tony spluttered. “ _No_. No, you know what? Forget it. Forget that and tell me about the cage.”

Teasing forgotten, the AI smoothly circled back to the matter at hand.

“I am unable to locate an opening, Sir,” Jarvis stated. “There are no visible or concealed joins present, nor are there signs that there ever have been. It appears that the structure was fabricated around the occupant.” There was almost a hint of hesitation on his part. “Sir, there appears to be a significant amount of degradation within the frame that indicates periods of electrification. The integrity of the entire structure, comprised of numerous materials; a composition of titanium and steel alloys being most prevalent, has been affected.”

Tony stopped short and blinked rapidly. “Are you trying to tell me that these bastards not only built this thing _around him_ and welded it shut, but they _electrified parts of it_ too?” He looked at the cage and grimaced. Even if it had only been specific bars or panels that had been charged at any one time, factoring in the size of the cage and the animal inside, avoiding getting shocked would have been impossible. There was no way around it. He was too big and the space was too small; there would be no other choice but to press up against the bars.

 _God_ , he thought, _that poor bastard._

“Yes, Sir,” JARVIS replied, his distaste obvious. “There is evidence of injuries, including burns, that appear to be both electrical and chemical. There are also signs of extensive tissue damage, although I am unable to determine the full extent of any internal injuries until a thorough physical examination has been performed.”

If he could’ve pinched the bridge of his nose, he would’ve, but seeing as his face was covered by a metal faceplate, Tony settled for exhaling heavily through his nose instead. He gave Steve a wary look, well aware that he’d heard everything (even without the comm in his ear he would have been able to hear it) and watched in morbid fascination as the misery melted away from the blond’s face and was instead replaced with an eerie calm that made his own hair stand on end.

Without taking his eyes off Steve, he prompted JARVIS for more information. “What else?” He asked. _God_ , what else was there? There was always something else. He really didn’t want to know what it was, but he needed to. If they were going to get this guy rehabilitated, they were going to need every ounce of data they could get their hands on.

“He appears to be suffering from severe muscle degradation and is extremely malnourished. From my estimations he weighs somewhere between six hundred and twenty to six hundred and thirty pounds. A healthy weight for an adult male Kodiak bear is between approximately six hundred to some thirteen hundred pounds.

They have, on occasion, been known to reach weights of fifteen hundred pounds, although the current record for an animal in captivity is approximately two thousand, one hundred pounds. _That being said_ ,” Jarvis impressed, “-in this case specifically, assuming these guidelines for minimum and maximum weights to be correct would be not only irresponsible, but also wildly inaccurate. At optimal health, the skull dimensions and femur length of this individual suggest that he should weigh almost four and a half times his current weight.”

Tony swallowed back a sudden rush of bile and forced himself to really look at the creature that Steve insisted was his best friend in animal form.

A quick mental calculation told him that this guy should be well over a ton, yet JARVIS put his weight at a little more than six hundred pounds. He knew that JARVIS was rarely (if ever) wrong, so if his AI said that he was just over six hundred pounds, then he was almost certainly _just over_ six hundred pounds.

It wasn’t enough; he was skin and bone and dear God, how the hell wasn’t he dead?

It wasn’t _enough_.

God, he hoped that Steve was wrong; he really hoped that it wasn’t Barnes in there.

If it _was_ Barnes locked away in that cage…

_Jesus Christ._

“One more thing, Sir...”

Everyone tensed and Tony let his eyes slip shut and bit down on the inside of his cheek until he tasted copper. Under his breath he muttered, _“God, could this get any fucking worse?”_ before he shook his head and let out a heavy sigh. “Right, ok, go on. Hit me with it.”

“There is a low frequency signal being emitted from inside the cage as we speak. I have determined the source to be the collar around the suspected Mr. Barnes’s neck.”

He and Steve shared an uneasy look and Tony moved closer to study the wide band of blackened metal that was exposed once Steve got his fingers into the thick shaggy coat and pushed it aside. It was cinched tight around Bucky-Bear’s neck and there was barely enough room to get a finger underneath it, let alone two.

That was the general rule of thumb, right? If you couldn’t fit two fingers between the collar and the animal’s neck, then it was too tight...?

Tony inwardly winced when he remembered that this was potentially a human being trapped in that cage, inside that bag of skin and bones _and when the actual fuck did he start thinking of the bear as Barnes in disguise?!_

“Any other nasty little surprises in there, J?” He watched as another struggling breath was taken and knew what his next move was going to be. “What’s the likelihood of us getting blown up or turned into human soup-”

_“Jesus, Tony!”_

“-if we get him out of there and cut that damn thing off?” As soon as Jarvis gave him the all clear, Tony gestured pointedly for Steve to cover Yogi’s eyes and the repulsor set into his palm flared to life. “Cover his head,” his tone brokered no arguments, “the last thing we need is him freaking the fuck out and ending up on fire. He seems to like you, so keep him calm and _for God’s sake_ , _do not_ let him get up.”

Once Steve had shrugged the top half of his suit off to use as a flame-retardant blanket and everything important was covered, Tony started cutting. The cage’s occupant made a token attempt to struggle but it was short-lived and, quite frankly, pathetic. He was too weak and he let out a heavy, pained huff then fell still with Steve’s hands stroking slow and steady over his too-skinny shoulder.

“Talk to me about the collar, JARVIS.”

As the narrowed repulsor beam made short work of the bars, Natasha and Clint turned the place upside down and pilfered any and all recoverable data they came across. There was a thick sheaf of papers stuffed into an old, discolored manilla that Clint found hidden in one of the desk drawers under a false bottom. The papers were torn in places and yellowed at the edges; They were covered in crudely sketched diagrams, a strange mish-mash of shorthand Cyrillic and German and there were random dark brown thumb-print smears on most of the pages.

As Clint was upending every drawer and cabinet he came across, Natasha was working to copy everything that had been left on the ancient computers onto a thumb drive that Tony himself had encrypted, safe from any viruses or trojans that may be lurking on the system. A lot of the files were corrupted, but there were still a large number available for them to salvage.

They took everything. Corrupted they may be, but they could still work with that.

There was a metallic clank as the first three of the cut-through bars fell to the concrete floor and Tony silently gestured for Steve to shift the fabric from his suit further down in case of any rogue sparks before starting back up.

“Aside from the low frequency signal, the collar appears to be otherwise innocuous. I am currently unable to pinpoint its intended purpose and there does not appear to be any tracking devices present. I have complete confidence that removal is safe as I am unable to detect any traces of chemicals, bacterial microbes, corrosive enzymes or electrical currents within the metal, nor is it lined with any organic matter or explosives charges.”

The metallic screech of the repulsor cutting through metal fell silent for a second, all of them filled with horror at the implications behind that little factoid, then flared back to life with fervor. The bars fell away one at a time in quick succession and before long the entire length of one side was wide open.

“Alright,” Steve murmured quietly, seemingly unaware that everyone else had stopped to see what would happen next, “We’re gonna get this thing off you, ok?” He gave Tony a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glance, prompting him into action. “Just a little longer, ok, Buck?” His voice was low and reassuring as weak paws twitched. It was soothing and soft in a way that none of _them_ had ever been privy to, anyway. “Tony’s gonna use a real small laser to cut through the collar. It’ll just be a few small sparks, maybe a little warm, then we’ll get you up and out of here, I swear.” The bear’s breath rasped out in a silent, tired groan and he fell still, seemingly able to grasp everything he’d just been told.

Suddenly, the idea of Barnes being in there didn’t seem so ludicrous. There was no way a regular bear was capable of that level of intelligence.

… was there?

Cutting through the collar was a tense affair. Once Tony had slapped one of Natasha’s teeny tiny taser disks onto it the low frequency signal coming from it died and they got to work. There was the worry that the laser would catch on the thick pelt underneath or that one simple slip-up could fuck everything to hell, but after what felt like a nerve wracking ten minutes (which in reality was probably only three), two clean slices had been made through the collar and it was being eased off and away.

The skin underneath was blistered and angry, raw in places and weeping in others; it looked uncomfortable and painful, but most of all, judging from the brief grimace of Steve’s face, the smell was downright _awful._ Those wounds were _definitely_ infected.

The process was repeated on the manacle fixed at his ankle; the task wasn’t made easy considering the manacle was embedded under the skin. It looked to have been there for a long time, long enough for the area around it to start swallowing the metal in patchy sections of fur and flesh. In the end the decision was made to carefully cut into the healed skin so they could peel it back and remove the remainder of the cuff.

Steve refused to let anyone else do it and his normally steady hands shook the whole time.

It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that the bear – Bucky? – didn’t even flinch when the knife Steve had pilfered from Natasha slid deeper until it hit metal, nor did he move when Steve’s breath hitched in his chest and his hand grew sticky around the knife’s handle. There was a complete lack of response to what _should_ have been excruciating pain.

The sight of Steve’s bloody hands and wet face made Tony feel sick all over again.

After that, they slowly and carefully worked their way along the improvised muzzle wrapped around his face; the skin underneath that wasn’t much better than the mess around his neck, but at least it wasn’t oozing from infection. If he got out of this without it scarring, it would be a goddamn miracle.

Once everything was cut away, Tony took a step back to give Steve room to look him over more thoroughly and got the remains of the collar bagged up for him to pick apart later back in the security of his lab.

Tony wanted to know what it was for and why it was emitting a signal in the first place.

Hell, he _needed_ to know the what and the why.

The care that the captain took with his (possibly?) friend as more and more hidden damage was revealed made even Natasha choke up.

Well, her eyes tightened at the edges and the muscle in her cheek twitched under her mask. That was a sign of discomfort, right?

Clint moved closer on silent feet and studied the mess of destroyed metal scattered around them. He looked over Steve’s shoulder with what had to be a wince (if the way his brows crinkled up was anything to go by) and let out a low whistle. “So, I hate to rain on your parade, Cap,” he started, “but how are we gonna get him outta here? He looks way bigger now that the cage is open and he’s not exactly gonna fit through the door like that, is he? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think he’s _strong enough_ to walk out of this place by himself.”

“He’s got a point.” Natasha agreed, glancing back over her shoulder briefly from where she’d returned to the computer bank. Her fingers continued to fly over the keyboards, one after another. “There’s no way he’s moving on his own.”

“What about a gurney?” Clint’s eyes bounced from Tony to Steve, then around the room. “Or we could fashion a litter of sorts and cart him out on that?”

“I could throw something together to use as a frame with this,” Tony nudged the jumbled mess of metal they’d cut away from the cage with his foot, “-but unless you’re volunteering to go back up a level to pilfer and scraps of bedding from the cells, of which there _are_ none, we’re shit out of luck.”

“Jesus, Tony,” Clint grumbled, “There’s no need to be an asshole. It was a good idea.”

“Sure, it was, Barton,” he simpered, “Or it would have been, that is, if there were any utilizable materials down here, anyway. Good job. Gold star for you.”

“Why are you such a dick, Tony? _Why_? Who the hell pissed in your cheerios, huh?”

The pair continued to snipe at each other until a throat cleared and every head in the room turned towards their team leader. “I might be able to get him to shift. I don’t even know if he’ll be able to and it’s gonna hurt, _a lot_ , but,” he took a shaky breath and fisted his tacky fingers into scraggly fur, “If I can convince him to shift, he’ll be easier to carry…” he inhaled deeply, one large hand pressed against a sluggishly moving flank, “It’s the only option.” He curled his free hand into a tight fist and repeated himself.

He sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than the rest of them.

“ _Steve-_ ”

His jaw clenched and he squared his shoulders. “ _Don’t_ , Tony,” he interrupted tersely. “Just… Just don’t.” The strain in his voice betrayed his exhaustion and he gave Bucky-Bear’s flank one last sweep with his hand.

“Alright, Buck, I know you’re hurting, I do, but we can’t get you outta here if you stay like this. We’re three stories underground; you’re too big to fit through the doorways and I can’t carry you in this form without hurting you even more.” He peered down at him, expression pleading. Natasha abandoned her task to stand by Clint and Tony as they watched, tense with anticipation. “You need to shift,” he shuffled back on his knees to give him room and carefully inched him a little further out of what was left of the cage. “You’re safe with us,” he told him. “I’m not gonna let anybody hurt you. You’re safe. I promise.”

Nothing happened.

Steve continued staring, the bear didn’t show any sign of moving and Tony was certain he was going to pass out soon if he held his breath for much longer.

“Buck, please,” Steve’s voice wobbled just a little, distressed. “ _Please_ ; you need to try. You can’t give up on me, James Buchanan Barnes. You-” he cleared his throat and blinked hard, “… _Please_ try? This isn’t the end. You promised ‘til the end.”

Nothing happened for over a minute and their hesitant anticipation started to fade to sympathy, convinced Steve was mistaken.

“Steve-” Natasha started but Clint cut her off with a raised hand.

“Wait.” He leaned in, narrowed eyes flaring with surprise. “Did you see- _Guys_.”

There was a collective murmur when what little of the wasted muscle that was left down the bear’s flank jumped beneath the skin with a ripple and he let out a rough, breathy rumble, tired and wounded. His legs twitched and he tried to lift his head but he just didn’t have the strength; he barely got two inches off the ground, possibly even less than that. He started to slump back down but at the last minute he gave a full-bodied jerk and the claws on all four paws started to shrink away beneath long, matted fur.

The shift was too slow to be painless, _way too slow,_ and the distressed whine he let out as his hands and feet started to re-shape made every single one of them wince.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the billionaire swore as he watched his teammate spur his apparent buddy along, voice calm and reassuring as bones started to warp and crack before sliding into a whole new shape. “You weren’t lying,” Tony rasped, awed. “ _Holy shit, you weren’t_ \- I thought you’d lost your damn marbles, but... What the actual _fuck_ am I seeing right now?!”

It took a while, longer than any of them would have liked and there were multiple hiccups where any attempts to shift stalled (in what appeared to be spectacularly painful fashion), before _bear_ started to look closer to something that resembled _man_.

There was a lot of sharp, sympathetic inhaling going on, liberally interspersed with a healthy dose of ‘what the fuck’. There was _a lot_ of ‘what the fuck’.

Steve didn’t pay attention to any of them, merely continued coaxing Bucky along until shaggy, unkempt fur slowly started to melt away into scar littered limbs that were so pale that a maze of bright blue veins under paper-thin skin were clearly visible. He looked as though he hadn’t been exposed to the sun in _years_.

Judging from the state of him, that probably wasn’t too far off the mark.

“Come on, Buck,” Steve’s voice was thick with grief, pained by what was gradually becoming evident; not only had he been locked away in a cage that was far too small and starved, but he’d also been tortured. There was no way he came about scars like that any other way. “That’s it, you’re doin’ real good. Just a little more,” he encouraged. “You’re almost there.”

There was a sickening crunch when the massive bear skull split and re-shaped that made them all cringe and yeah, it wasn’t just Clint’s face that turned a little green, but none of them looked away, all of them watching in morbid fascination.

The inhumanly large bear that had been in front of them a matter of minutes ago was no longer some six hundred pounds of animal. Instead, in its place right there on the floor in front of them, was the sweat soaked body of a man, maybe six or so feet tall, his naked skin snow white pale. He had a tangled mane of dark, almost black, hair that shrouded his face and he was shaking so hard that his teeth were chattering behind his cracked and bloodied lips. His fingers were twitching weakly against the floor and his jaw was dotted with patchy scruff.

He was dangerously thin with little to no body fat and his cheekbones stood out in sharp relief over hollowed cheeks.

The wounds that had been previously visible when he was in animal form, distressing as they’d been before, looked even worse now that he was in his human one.

The wire that had bound his mouth closed had left its mark, cheeks crosshatched with angry red cuts and scrapes, his neck was red and weeping where the collar had been and his ankle... God, his ankle. The wound was bleeding freely now, no doubt irritated by the shift, and Steve hastily tugged off his undershirt to wrap the torn-up mess.

As soon as Steve’s big hands got within reaching distance of Bucky’s foot he tried to flinch away, but being as weak as he was, he didn’t exactly get far.

Steve froze and his face fell. He swallowed hard, eyes wide and wet.

“I’m not gonna hurt you, Buck, I swear I’m not. I just wanna wrap your ankle to stop the bleeding.” He reassured softly. “I promise I won’t hurt you.” He repeated the former over again and slowly reached toward his ankle a few inches at a time. He had more success this time and had his shirt knotted around the bleeding wound in no time.

“Right,” Tony tried not to sound as dumbstruck as he felt and cleared his throat. “How’s about we get out of here? I assume you’re planning to carry him out yourself?” He nodded when Steve made an affirmative noise and once they were sure they’d collected every ounce of information they possibly could, Natasha and Clint moved out into the hall to start clearing the way back to the jet.

The place was littered with all sorts of rubble and debris and they wanted to get out of there with as few roadblocks as possible.

Tony observed the remaining pair from just inside the doorway, chest tight and sad as he watched the larger than life super-soldier lean toward the bloody body on the floor, attempting to comfort him in a barely audible murmur and keep his shit together at the same time.

There was nothing in Barnes’s gray gaze, he just stared sightlessly to the right of Steve’s knee, unresponsive. If it wasn’t for the barely noticeable rise and fall of his chest, he could have been easily been mistaken for dead.

He hated that Steve had been right. He hated that Steve’s best friend, the one he’d thought dead, had been locked in that cage for god only knew how long and that he was in such wretched shape.

More than anything, he hated that if he’d gotten his way and they’d put the animal out of its misery that he could have-

Barnes would be dead, and that would have been entirely on him.

“Cap,” he prodded quietly, “Cap, we need to leave. Do you need help picking him up?” When no response came, he stepped closer. “ _Steve_.”

The blond cleared his throat and shook his head before he finally managed to get his hand close enough to touch his friend’s head. “No,” he carefully tucked a lock of dark, greasy hair behind ‘ _not-a-bear-anymore’_ Bucky’s ear and quietly told his friend what he was about to do, thumb sweeping against the thin, delicate skin beneath his eye.

“Alright, Buck, I’m gonna slide my arms under you and pick you up real careful, ok?” He waited for a response but got nothing in return.

Tony found himself wanting to reach out, to help, but he knew that Steve wouldn’t let him so he hovered in the doorway, ready to guide them back through the labyrinth of corridors and stairwells. The burn in his chest had nothing to do with the glowing arc-reactor that happened to reside there.

The big blond visibly steeled himself and worked his hands between the filthy concrete floor and Bucky’s limp body, carefully lifted him into his arms then climbed to his feet. Steve swallowed thickly and cleared his throat, eyes glassing up. He tried not to think about how heavy he was, or rather, how heavy he _wasn’t_.

“Alright,” he tentatively adjusted his grip and blinked hard and slow when Bucky’s head lolled against his shoulder and left the bare skin smeared with fresh blood. He took another fortifying breath and pressed on. “Alright,” he murmured against the top of his head, “-let’s get you outta here.”


	3. Three.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!! As some of you might know, or not, I like to stay ahead of myself when I'm posting, have a chapter or two written ahead of the most recent update... Well, I finally got chapter 4 wrapped up, so here's a new chapter for you!!
> 
> As always, there be angst, descriptions and talk of injuries/torture and a healthy amount of swearing. So.. pretty much standard content for my fics - Happy reading!
> 
> (I'm absolutely blown away by the response to this - thank you for all of your support, guys.. So, so much!)
> 
> Oh!! By the way, I've changed the nickname that Steve uses for Darcy (for reasons.) - It was 'Hummingbird', it is now 'Butterfly'. Each chapter has been adjusted accordingly.

“That’s weird.”

Darcy only heard Jane’s bemused observation because she was in between songs but the fact that something strange was going on and Jane had even noticed was always concerning. The astrophysicist wasn’t exactly the most observant of people, particularly when she had her head buried in her work.

She tugged one of her earphones free and jerked her chin at her boss, gaze questioning. Her first attempt to speak was hampered by then pen in her mouth and she hastily spat it out and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. “What’s weird?” Second time’s the charm.

Jane shot her a bemused look and peered past her through the glassy lab walls. “The emergency lights are flashing; they normally only do that when Tony sets something on fire.”

“I’m sorry, when _who_ sets something on fire?”

Jane glared at her out of the corner of her eye. “Shush you. _What I was getting at_ ,” she spoke louder to be heard over Darcy’s sniggering, “-is that I didn’t think he was here to blow anything up. I could have sworn he was off on some top secret something or other.” Her nose crinkled curiously as she stretched up onto her toes to look at something outside the lab. “He _is_ out of the labs, right?”

“Yeah, he’s out with Nat, Clint and-” her eyes widened, her stomach dropped, and her feet skidded across the floor as she spun in her chair, wide eyes taking in the activity in the halls. They couldn’t hear anything from inside the lab’s thick blast proof, soundproof walls, but there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that it was noisy out there; there were people scrambling out of the woodwork. She and Jane shared a look and the scientist immediately abandoned the wrench in her hand to follow Darcy out into the hallway.

A wall of sound hit them as soon as the lab’s doors slid open and Darcy took an unconscious step back, overwhelmed. Jane braced her from behind and they took in the chaos through wide eyes.

_“-inbound, ETA seven minutes-”_

_“- Stark said to page Doctor Banner and get him to meet them on the landing pad.”_

_“-anyone know who we’re treating?!”_

_“-says we’re going to need some of the nutrient packs that were formulated for Captain Rogers. Lucy – **Lucy**! Here, take the keys and grab some of the packs from The Captain’s med supply. Better make it a few, it sounds bad, and **you** get the saline-”_

Darcy swallowed sickly and blindly groped behind her for Jane. “Jane,” she squeaked, “Janey, he hasn’t called…” She fought back tears, scared. What if something had happened to Steve? He said he’d call her when they were on their way back and he hadn’t, yet the med team were scrambling for the supplies that had been specially formulated with his accelerated metabolism in mind. If he hadn’t called and they needed supplies to treat a super-soldier… Well, he was the only super-soldier on the team, wasn’t he. “Janey, he didn’t call. _He said he’d call_.”

Jane’s fingers curled around her hand and she tugged hard as she started following the rush of nurses down the hall. “It might not be him,” she looked back over her shoulder at her and Darcy numbly realized she was guiding her towards the emergency elevators that only the two of them, Tony and Bruce had access to, “-but if it is, you’re sure as hell gonna be there when they land. Come on, Darcy - _hustle_! Pick your feet up!"

She allowed herself to be bundled into the elevator and clung to Jane’s hand as she chewed on her lip. “Jane, what if he’s-”

“You don’t even know if it’s him.” Jane interrupted curtly. “Stop catastrophizing, Darcy.”

Darcy took a deep, calming breath through her nose, let it out through her mouth and squared her shoulders. Yes, Jane was being a little short with her, but she appreciated her no-nonsense attitude, was grateful for it, in fact. If Jane visibly stressed out then it would only lead to Darcy freaking out even more.

“You’re right,” she nodded firmly and inhaled deeply through her nose, then blew it out through her mouth. “You’re right. It could be anyone. It might not even be Steve. It could be anyone.”

If all this fuss was for someone else and Steve wasn’t the one who was being hauled back to the compound in a medical emergency, she was absolutely prepared to have some seriously strong words with her darling boyfriend.

He said he’d let her know when he was on his way back. _He promised_. If _he_ wasn’t the one on death’s door, she was going to kill him herself. Well, she wouldn’t kill him, but she was inclined to slap him silly, at least.

Ok, she wouldn’t _actually_ slap him. Unless he asked her to. But that was different. Completely unrelated.

Anyway.

When they reached the landing pad Bruce was already there with his eyes cast skyward, wringing his hands in front of him. Jane called ahead to him and he turned, eyebrows jumping when he saw them approaching.

“Shit, Darce, I’m sorry,” he hurried to explain when he saw her pale face, “Steve’s ok. I forgot to catch you on my way past. He’s fine. He’s not injured.”

The bands of anxiety that had been squeezing her chest loosened and a relieved breath gusted out of her. Now that she knew it wasn’t Steve being rushed in, something else uneasy started to pull at her gut. “If it’s not Steve then who is it?” She asked with a frown. “If it isn’t him why do they need his ‘Steve Was Stupid’ juice?”

Bruce opened his mouth to reply but the sound of the jet approaching distracted them all and he glanced back to the sky, then at her again. “I think you’re going to have to talk to Steve about that, Darce.” He shot her an apologetic look that only made her unease deepen. “They’re about to land,” he told her, “give me a minute to get in there and see what we’re dealing with and I’ll make sure you’re clear to join us, ok?”

She frowned at him, perturbed, but nodded silently and he gave her upper arm a light pat.

“He’s ok, Darcy. Just give us a few minutes.”

As soon as the jet landed the medical staff started moving toward the lowering ramp but stopped short when they were waved back and Bruce headed in alone.

“Jane, what’s going on?” Darcy glanced at the other people gathered and their confusion was just as visible as hers. There was an uneasy murmur as the group waited for the signal to move.

Things just kept getting weirder and weirder. She had a bad feeling about this.

Jane’s eyebrows bunched up and she looked around, mouth twisted in confusion. “I…” she opened her mouth then closed it again with a click. “I don’t know.”

For a minute, maybe two, there was no movement from the jet. The ramp was empty one minute and Natasha appeared the next, eyes searching the crowd until they fell on Darcy. Sharp green eyes gazed at her for a long moment, and didn’t _that_ do wonders for Darcy’s nerves, before she jerked her chin at her and beckoned her closer with a curl of her fingers.

She gave Jane a quick, bemused glance then started toward the jet at a light jog, hand pressed against the top of her bust to hold the girls in place so she didn’t rupture something (there was a reason she punked out of gym class every week in high school – big boobs and running weren’t exactly a match made in heaven). She cursed up a storm the whole way, berating herself for choosing to wear a bra that was pretty instead of functional when she’d dragged herself out of bed that morning.

Natasha’s eyes gleamed for a moment before the amusement fell away and her lips thinned. She took Darcy’s hand as soon as she was close enough and helped her jump up the ramp, her other hand braced against her elbow to steady her.

“What’s going on?” She asked the redhead softly, unable to see past Bruce, Clint and Tony. Bruce was quietly asking Tony questions but otherwise it was quiet inside the jet. “What happened? Is- is Steve alright?”

The look on Natasha’s face was unsettling.

“Did Steve tell you anything about the mission?”

She shook her head and tugged her hair back into a messy knot on top of her head when Natasha handed her a hair tie. “No, my clearance level isn’t-” Natasha’s lifted a cool eyebrow and Darcy stopped mid-sentence, her nose scrunched up in a wince. She wasn’t sure who she was trying to fool, but it sure as hell wasn’t Nat; Steve didn’t give a shit about her so-called clearance level and everybody on the team knew it. If he wanted to tell her, he was going to tell her. She started over. “If it’s not safe for me to know or if Steve doesn’t know anything about it himself, we don’t discuss details.”

“We received some intel about an old underground bunker, probably HYDRA. Well-hidden and abandoned. Nothing too unusual inside until we got to the basement level which is where we found him.”

Darcy’s heart started to thud heavily in her chest and she swallowed thickly. Her tongue felt drier than the desert and three sizes too big for her mouth. “Found who?” The barely there murmuring nearby quieted and she felt all eyes on her. She resolutely _did not_ look back at them and her eyes narrowed at the sudden silence. “Nat.” She scowled at the way the Russian was stringing her along and ground out a seriously annoyed, “Found _who_?”

Steve’s voice called past the others, cracked and quiet. “Butterfly?”

She looked from Bruce to Tony, from Tony to Clint, then frowned at Natasha, wholly unimpressed, and pushed by them all.

When she saw Steve tucked into a corner, smeared in all kinds of filth, face pale and red eyed her eyes popped wide open. She was going to ask what the hell had happened and if the blood on his bare chest was his, then she saw who was next to Steve on one of the on-board stretchers and promptly choked on her own tongue.

  * Tall, almost as tall as Steve himself (or at least she suspected he would be if he were stretched out instead of curled in on himself); c _heck._
  * Dark hair, albeit a fair bit longer than it had been in the pictures she’d seen; _check._
  * Strong jawline, dimpled chin and killer cheekbones that were made painfully evident by an absolutely horrifying lack of body fat _; check, check and check._



_No. Fucking. Way._

“S-steve?” She blinked rapidly and shot her boyfriend a very startled, wild eyed look. “Steve, is that- but he- _is that who I think it is?!”_

He scrubbed a hand over his face, something ruddy and brown over and between his fingers. The tired smile he aimed at her didn’t fool her one bit. She knew him well enough to know when he was faking; if that smile wasn’t forced, she was actually a six-foot-four bearded trucker from Alabama named Otis who moonlighted as a burlesque dancer in the off-season.

The smile on his face wavered and Darcy’s stomach pitched when the smile dropped clear off his face, like somebody turned off the light switch. Exhaustion bled into every part of him. “Depends who you think it is.”

She inched closer until she was able to skirt her way between the stretcher and the bench Steve was slumped on.

If she thought he’d looked awful from a few feet away, the dark-haired man looked even worse up close. He was beyond frail, like the slightest breeze would dissolve him into dust. The urge to swaddle him in blankets and feed him up was both swift and strong.

She could almost smell the sickness rolling off him.

Darcy inched those final few inches closer, close enough to smell the coppery tang of blood and fetid muck on Steve’s skin, and settled beside him.

“Unless you showed me pictures of a complete stranger and claimed it was him…” she teased gently, tangling their fingers together and his mouth gave an exhausted twitch, “That’s him, isn’t it? He’s your Bucky.”

She wasn’t even going to ask how he was still alive seventy years after he’d been declared MIA, even though she really, _really_ wanted to.

Steve’s eyes slipped shut and he sighed, mouth twisting miserably. He gave her a solitary nod and closed eyes screwed up even tighter. “I left him behind,” his breath shuddered out of him and the hand tangled with hers squeezed her fingers until they started to prickle from blood loss and her knuckles turned white. His other hand, the one resting against Bucky’s forearm, remained lax, fingers light and loose against his damaged skin. Two ruddy, stained fingers hovered over the inside of Bucky’s skinny wrist and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Steve was actively monitoring the other man’s pulse. “Darcy _,_ I screwed up, _”_ he croaked _, “I left him **behind** , Darce_.”

She didn’t even hesitate to reach for him and wordlessly guided Steve’s head to her shoulder, careful to make sure that Bucky was still within reach and tucked his face into her neck. Her ringed fingers carded through his hair and she hushed him quietly, lips against his brow. She blatantly side-stepped what he’d just said. She knew her boyfriend; trying to convince him that he wasn’t one hundred percent responsible for this mess was pointless.

“I should have known,” he mumbled into her neck between wet, shuddering sniffles, “I didn’t go back for him and I left him there. _I left him_ and they-” he choked a little and fingers curled around her hip, grip tight. “They had him in a cage, Darce; a fucking _cage_ that wasn’t even big enough for him to move and-” he pushed even closer to her. “I’ve never seen him this sick or skinny, Darcy. _Never._ They hurt him and _he’s not dead…_ ”

“We’ll take care of him,” She stroked the back of her boyfriend’s neck and looked down at the man on the stark white sheets beside them. There was a blue waffle-weave blanket tucked around him like a burrito and his eyes were barely open, just far enough to make out a faint glint of silver. There was nothing in his gaze that indicated even a hint of awareness, he was completely catatonic. “We’ll help him get better, ok, Babe?” She mentally congratulated herself for keeping her voice nice and steady. Staying calm right now was important. “We’re gonna do everything we can to make sure of it.”

Just looking at the mess of a man on the bed made her want to cry. Not because he was her boyfriend’s long-lost lover. Yes, she knew all about that, Steve had told her about he and Bucky being together well before they’d even started dating (not that she was all that surprised. You don’t defy direct orders, parachute behind enemy lines and raise an entire base to the ground all by yourself for _just a friend_ ; _“Subtlety’s never been your strong suit, has it, Steven?”_ ), but because of the state he was currently in.

He barely resembled the man in the pictures Steve had shown her and why the _hell_ did his captors have him in a cage??

She made a mental note to ask about that later, now didn’t seem the time.

There was dried blood flaking off his skin, no small amount of it, though someone had obviously attempted to clean him up. She was willing to put every cent she had on it being Steve. His hair had been tucked up away from his neck where there was a weeping, blistered band circling his throat. The skin was newly crusted over in some places, bloody, black with bruising and angry, shiny red in others. A twisting pattern of deep lines were scored into his face and his lips were pale and cracked, torn in the corners. His left ankle was poking out from under the edge of the blanket with a blood-soaked wad of fabric wound tightly around that looked suspiciously like one of Steve’s compression shirts. It went a long way towards explaining his lack of clothing and the blood on Steve’s arms and hands.

She watched Bruce peel back the blanket so he could insert an IV to get some emergency fluids into him. When she saw the mess of scar tissue laddering up both of his arms her eyes immediately teared up and she made an involuntary sound of distress. “Oh my god, _Steve._..”

There were _so many_ scars.

Steve made a sound of acknowledgement and swallowed thickly. “I know.”

Laddered was right, they striped along his limbs at random intervals in varying widths, but the worst of them by far started a few inches above his left elbow and there were three of them.

Each one stood proud from his skin, ragged and gnarled. The thick rope of one circled around the entirety of his bicep, halfway between elbow and shoulder and another curled from the underside of his arm and spiderwebbed out onto his chest.

The third was a large star-shaped brand with messy, uneven lines that furrowed deep into the meat of his shoulder; or what _had been_ the meat of his shoulder. It obviously had some age to it, but it was still dark pink and rough around the edges.

It took a good, hard swallow to push down the bile as it crept up into the back of her throat. She hoped to Christ that he was unconscious when they did that to him.

As she ran her eyes over him one more time, she started to notice a pattern. Starting at the elbow and all the way down to his wrists, the pale bands of skin between each scar looked newer and smoother than the last. His hands were much the same but the silvery lines that striped along the length of each finger and between each joint were narrower and cleaner.

_Intentional._

Nobody ended up with scars that perfect by accident.

He looked like he’d been taken apart in pieces and sewn back together like a living, breathing mockery of a ragdoll. There were others elsewhere, on every limb, in fact, but the jagged, uneven laddering on his arms and the smooth, silvery bands on his fingers were the ones that unsettled her the most.

Her brows furrowed and she silently stuck a pin in that disturbing line of thought so she could ease Steve back upright, tucked the sleeve of her shirt over her hand and wiped at his damp cheeks.

“Right,” she cupped his cheeks in her hands, “I know this is horrible and it hurts like a motherfucker, but you need to try to hold it together for a little bit. Bruce needs to get Bucky inside so he can help him and he can’t do that with you holding onto your boy like some sort of territorial guard dog.” She smiled softly at his wet snort and carefully pried his fingers open so Bruce was able to start readying his newly acquired patient for transport inside. Steve’s fingers flexed in hers and he opened his mouth to object, but she silenced him with a look. “He’s not going anywhere, Steve. They’re taking him inside, that’s all.”

“But I--”

“ _Steven_.” She warned and his mouth snapped shut. “He is undoubtedly in pain and he needs medical attention. If you don’t get out of the way and let the doctors do their job, he can’t get it. You might think you’re helping right now, but you’re not. You’re hindering. Move out of the way, Steve.”

He swallowed thickly and sniffled, loud and wet and undignified. “Ok,” he breathed with a nod, “You’re,” another wet snuffle, “Yeah, ok. M’sorry, you’re right. You’re right.”

She snorted and kissed the back of his hand. “Of course I am,” she told him. “I’m always right. I’m glad you finally caught up with the rest of the class and figured it out.”

He climbed to his feet and stepped aside so one of the nurses was able to squeeze by to take the bag of saline that Bruce had hooked up to the IV in Bucky’s arm. In the few minutes it took to transfer the poor bastard from the on-board stretcher onto a gurney, Darcy managed to locate Steve’s duffle bag and got him a fresh shirt that she had to help him shrug into because his hands were shaking too much to do it himself.

She’d never seen him this bad and her hands lingered on his ribs a minute longer. To an outsider it might have looked like a worried girlfriend comforting her distressed boyfriend, which it was, but it was more than that. Darcy’s hands were curled around his ribs because she was scared that he was going to fall. There wasn’t much she could do to stop it from happening, but she could at least slow the descent a little. Maybe.

Finally, once everything was in order, Bruce gave the go-ahead and one by one everybody on board started down the ramp, out into the sunshine. Clint lead the way with Nat and Bruce bracketing the gurney from either side in amongst the med-team. Tony hung back to step out of his suit and it was obvious that he was sticking around in case extra support was needed. Darcy caught his eye and her mouthed ‘thank you’ was waved off with a mildly embarrassed flail.

Her hand smoothed a circle over Steve’s lower back and she bumped his shoulder with her head. “You good to follow?”

“Yeah, yeah, m’good.” He gave an almighty, wet snuffle, swiped at his wet nose with his thumb and scrubbed it against his thigh, then reached for her hand. He rolled his eyes at the grossed-out curl of her lip.

“That sounded chunky, Rogers.” She took his hand anyway. “I can’t believe your nose just squelched. You’re so gross.”

He gave her a barely there smile and squeezed her fingers. “You love me anyway.”

“I do,” she readily agreed, “-but you’re still gross.”

They followed the swarm of medical staff into the compound. From there, Bucky was bundled into the large, double doored elevator down the hall to be taken down to medical with Bruce right beside him. She and Steve, unable to fit inside with everyone else, veered off towards the private elevator she had used to get to the landing pad; it would get them to the medical wing just as Bucky arrived there himself, if not before.

Once they were alone Darcy took the time to really look him over. He was filthy and more than a little ripe, but she could see that underneath all the blood and dirt and stink that he was exhausted. He looked like he didn’t know whether he wanted to sleep or cry. She could tell by the way he was working his jaw that tears were more likely. “Hey,” her arms slipped around his waist and as she pressed up against him his hands fisted in the back of her shirt, desperate for something to hold onto.

“Are you ok?” She asked, rocking him from foot to foot as she gave him a good squeeze. “Be honest, Steve. You might be one of the best bullshitters around, but I can spot your tells a mile off. There's a difference between bullshitting during an op and lying to your friends and family. The sheer amount of people who don’t realize you’re actually a really shitty liar is ridiculous.”

He snorted against her cheek and dropped his face against the top of her head. “No,” he finally croaked, his voice rough like he’d been gargling glass. “No, I’m not.”

“I meant what I said before, Steve,” she pulled back to look up at him. “We’ll get him the help he needs. We’ll look after him.”

“You don’t have to do this.” He knuckled at his eyes and his nose scrunched up as he tried to stave off more tears. “He’s not your responsibility, Butterfly. You don’t have to.”

She popped up on her toes and planted a firm kiss on his mouth, his lips salty from tears and swollen from chewing on them. There was a raw tang inside his bottom lip that said he’d already bitten it bloody. “You’re right; he’s _not_ my responsibility and I know I don’t have to,” she told him, “but I _want_ to. I want to help you, Steve, and I know that he’s important to you, so I want to help _him_ too _._ You don’t have to do this alone. Let me help.”

His breath caught and he stared down at her with wide eyes. “You sound just like-” he stopped himself and blinked hard. “Ok. Ok, you can- _thank you_.”

She gave him a firm nod and took his hand again as the elevator doors slid open. “Good choice, Rogers. Smart.”

“Yeah, well, it was bound to happen sometime, wasn’t it.”

**

“Hey.” Darcy adjusted the plastic bag around her wrist and clicked the door closed behind her before making her way across the room to stand by Steve’s side. She set the bag down on the small cabinet beside the bed, set her keys and phone down alongside it and reached her fingers out to scratch through his hair. He leaned into her hand and let out a quiet hum that made her lips quirk into a small smile. “Brought you some food.” She swept her hand over his hair and dropped a kiss against his brow then went to grab a seat. “S’your favorite,” she told him, “-from that little Italian place in town. Sausage and mushroom rigatoni. Extra _everything_.”

He was poking through the bag’s contents when she came back and as she pulled the chair up to sit beside him, he shot her a tired smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Thanks, Butterfly,” he mumbled, fingers plucking at the polystyrene takeaway container. “You didn’t have to go all the way into town just for me, though.” His stomach rumbled loudly and he had the little plastic wrapped knife and fork in his hand, but he made no move to open the container.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” her hand found his knee and she rubbed a light circle over the inside of it, “I was hungry and figured it’d be rude to feed myself and not you.” She rubbed her cheek against his upper arm and he pressed his face into her hair with a weary sigh.

“So this is a pity meal, then.”

“Damn right, it is. Now be grateful and eat it or I’ll give it to the nightshift – there should be enough there to feed the six of them...” He nosed into her hair with a quiet laugh. She gave him a nudge that prodded him into eating and didn’t take her eyes off him until he’d put the third forkful of pasta into his mouth.

It was late, well after midnight, and Steve hadn’t left Bucky’s bedside since they’d finally gotten him settled in his own room, warm, comfortable and most importantly, safe. Nobody had been able to tell her much so far, the entire day had been fucking chaos and it was only now that things had quieted down that she was able to actually sit down with Steve and try to figure out what the fuck was going on.

There were so many questions that she wanted to ask but she didn’t have a clue where to start.

She swirled her fingers in small, absent circles over the nape of his neck and as he ate, she studied the man, his Bucky, in the bed.

There were tubes and lines hooked up to him all over and a frightening amount of cables and monitors lined up along the opposite side of the bed, each of them lit up with a different purpose. She recognized the heartrate monitor, the oxygen sats and blood pressure read-outs, but that was as far as her knowledge stretched. She had no idea what more than half of the others were for.

Somebody had cleaned him up properly now and the skin that had been hidden under all that blood and filth was sickly pale and covered in marks, a mess of scarring and bruised wounds that had either been patched or carefully coated in medicated salves. His hair was still an absolute wreck, matted and greasy but as tidy as they could manage for now, and his eyes were still vacant and barely open. She could see the silver gleam of them under the warm, low lighting and the complete lack of _anything_ in them made her want to cry.

Steve had always described Bucky Barnes as a vibrant man, big and bright and bold, as someone who, when they entered a room, you just couldn’t ignore. Even after Azzano, when Steve said that Bucky’s shine had dulled some, it was still there, you just had to know where to look. He had a presence that filled the whole damn building.

Darcy could see the hints of the man he’d been in the arch of his eyebrows and bow of his upper lip. The breadth of his shoulders, emaciated as they were, told of a build that should have been wide and strong. She could see echoes of Bucky Barnes in this man, but they were only echoes.

Now, he just looked small.

“Steve,” her voice was hushed and even though her eyes were fixed on Bucky’s still form, she knew that Steve had looked up from his food. “Steve, how is this even-?” She peered at him, eyes sad and confused. “What happened? I thought Bucky died during the war.”

He swallowed his current mouthful and poked at a chunk of mushroom with his shitty plastic fork. “So did I,” he glanced at her and forced himself to take another bite. “He fell out of the train, Darce _. I watched him fall_ until I couldn’t see him anymore and I don’t know why I never stopped to consider that he might’ve still been alive. I thought he was dead and I wanted to go get him so I could take him home, but the brass said no and I didn’t-“ he took a long, deep breath through his nose and clutched at the hand she offered him. “This is all my fault.”

Her nose wrinkled in confusion and she wriggled her fingers until they were laced with his instead of curled around. “How is this your fault?” She questioned. “He fell hundreds of feet from a moving train, Steve. Nobody is going to assume that someone could survive that fall; I honestly don’t know how he did. But, Steve, as far as those jackasses telling you that you couldn’t go back for him? Fuck them. Whatever happened out there, however those crazies managed to get their hands on him?” She gave his hand sharp tug that brought his eyes up to meet hers. “Steve, that’s on them. If they’d allowed you to go out there and look for him, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. If you’re gonna be mad at anyone, Steve, be mad at them.”

He dropped his fork into the almost empty takeaway carton and let out a humorless snort. “That part, yeah, sure. But the rest of it? The fact that I didn’t even question whether he’d survived or not?” The miserable twist of his mouth made her want to reach out and smudge it away with her thumb, “I should have known that there was a chance he’d make it through that. Considering everything else he could do…”

Her eyes narrowed. There was something off about the things he was saying and Darcy’s ‘Steve is full of shit’ radar was screaming at her. There was more to this than some miraculous feat of survival and screwed up Hydra fuckery and she damn well wanted to know what it was.

“What aren’t you telling me?” He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye and Darcy heard the radar claxons in her head. “Steve, what do you know?” She squinted at him, then cut her eyes toward an unresponsive Bucky. “Do you know how he fell that far without being killed? Do you know why he didn’t die??”

She patiently waited him out, let him gather his thoughts enough to explain. His fingers plucked and tugged at the seam of his jeans and he swallowed thickly, eyes closed.

“He,” he took a deep breath and when finally turned to look at her, his eyes were all glassed up and his lashes were spiky with unshed tears. He flexed his hand around hers. “Bucky was just a normal kid, you know? He was just a regular kid who liked to play in the dirt and skid down the stairs on his Ma’s fancy tea tray so fast that he couldn’t stop and he’d end up bouncing off the wall at the bottom,” Darcy giggled and his miserable, watery frown turned into a watery smile. “He always used to sneak out onto the roof to look at the stars, even in the snow and his Ma, God, she was forever chasin’ after him when he was young, pullin’ her hair out because he wouldn’t keep his damn clothes on.” He scoffed and shook his head. “Never really grew outta that one.”

Darcy let out a very loud, very unladylike snort and slapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh my god, I’m sorry. That was awful. I’m sorry,” she giggled softly and it died away as soon as she remembered that the little boy that Steve was talking about was the husk of a man swaddled in blankets in front of them. “Sounds like he was a handful.”

“Yeah,” his thumb swept across the back of her hand absently, “Yeah, he was.” After a moment he cleared his throat and straightened. “When he was twelve, he got sick, and when I say sick, I mean sick. We all thought he was gonna die. He was in a lot of pain, fever, vomiting, the works. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with him, but Mr. and Mrs. Barnes? Ma and I knew that they weren’t expecting him to pull through. His parents tried to hide it, they didn’t want the girls to see, but they were scared, Darce.”

Her eyes were wide and startled. “It was that bad?”

He gave her a small nod. “It was that bad,” he confirmed. “Everyone talks about how sick I used to get all the time, but Bucky damn near died. Well before I ever did, anyway. After about two weeks or so he started getting better and within another week after that, nobody could even tell he’d ever been sick. He’d regained the weight that’d dropped off him and he was full of energy, stronger than ever.”

“Did they ever find out what was wrong with him?”

The way Steve sucked on his teeth set her on edge, but she waited, and waited, and waited, until finally, he nodded. “It wasn’t that he was sick,” he hedged, “It was more a case of his body trying to adjust and get ready for his first shift.”

She blinked mutely at him, gave Bucky a long, lingering look, then turned back with a quirked eyebrow. “What was he shifting? Do you mean his first day at work?”

Steve winced and opened his mouth to correct her, then snapped it shut. “No, I-”

“What then?” She was so very, very confused. What on earth was he talking about? “I don’t understand,” she frowned.

Steve’s shoulders squared and Darcy instinctively sat up. She’d seen him do this before, had watched him square up and ready himself for what he thought was going to turn into a shit-fight. It made her feel sick to think that he was doing this because of a conversation he was trying to have with _her_.

“Just after Bucky turned twelve, his animal presented and he went through his first shift. His body changed into an animal. He shifted.”

An incredulous bark of laughter burst out of her and she shook her head. “An animal,” she snorted in disbelief, “Like a shapeshifter. He physically changed shape and turned into an animal.” She wrinkled her brow at him and tried to spot any indication that he was pulling her leg, only to come up short. “Are you serious, Steve? You’re trying to tell me your sweetheart is a werewolf or something?”

“ _You sound just like Tony,”_ he muttered under his breath, “No, he’s not a werewolf,” she started to get angry, because, what the fuck was he playing at? She was about to start ranting when he continued. “He’s a bear, actually. He can shapeshift into a bear.”

“He’s a were-bear.”

“He’s not a were-bear.”

“But you said he could turn into a bear, therefore wouldn’t that make him a were-bear?”

“ _He isn’t a_ -” his cheeks were blotchy red and he took a deep calming breath, “God, are you sure you’re not related to Tony? I know he ran the tests and it turned out that the weird wasn’t genetic, just coincidence, but _are you sure_?”

She gaped at him, wide eyed and incredulous. “ _I. Am_. _Offended.”_ Her incredulity melted into gentle amusement and she pursed her lips. “So, not a were-bear?”

“No, Butterfly, not a were-bear. A bear. He was never attacked by a supernatural creature carrying a viral disease, or however it is that were-things happen, he’s just a bear. He was born with the ability to shift into a very large brown bear. Emphasis on the large.”

Darcy stared at him for a long minute, unsure of whether she wanted him to be lying to her or telling her the truth. When he met her eyes without a hint of deceit, she blinked rapidly and swallowed loudly. “You- you’re serious. He’s a shapeshifter.”

“Yes.”

“He can turn into a-“

“A bear, yes.”

She glanced back and forth between her boyfriend and his childhood sweetheart. What the absolute shitting hell was going on? Seriously. “Like a grizzly bear?” She asked suddenly, forging on at his bemused blink. “You said very large brown bear, right? So, like, a grizzly bear?” Her nose wrinkled. “I feel like we’ve said bear way too many times in the past three minutes.”

Steve breathed a small, quiet laugh and pressed his mouth against her forehead. His stubble scratched against her skin and she grabbed hold of the only normal thing that had happened all day with both hands. And by normal, she meant his shirt. She fisted her hands in his shirt.

“You’re taking this awfully well, you know.” He told her in a quiet murmur.

“Uh, no. No, I’m not.” Her voice got that little bit higher with every word. “I’m shitting myself six ways from Sunday right now, you just can’t see me doing it.” She tried to sound like she wasn’t in a state of hysterical shock, but the slightly manic edge in her voice just _might_ have given her away. She leaned into Steve when he curled his arm around her shoulder and stroked his palm up and down her spine. His hand was big and warm. “So. A grizzly bear. Your boy’s a grizzly bear.”

“Kodiak, actually. He looks like a great, big Kodiak bear that’s roughly the size of a Volkswagen. Or bigger. Actually, I think he might be bigger.”

“What’s the difference?” Darcy wondered aloud. Out of everything he’d just said, she wasn’t touching the ‘he’s bigger than a Volkswagen’ thing, Jesus, the difference between the two bears seemed the sanest route to take. What the actual fuck was her life? “Isn’t a Kodiak bear just a grizzly bear that lives on Kodiak Island?”

He bodily hauled her into his lap. She went with a squeak and a flail (that wasn’t at all panicked nor dramatic, _thank you),_ but once she was resting on his thighs she happily settled in his lap and curled into his chest.

“Common misconception, Butterfly. Yes, they live on Kodiak Island, but they’re a different sub-species. Bigger. Not _quite_ as bat-shit nasty as grizzlies, or at least that’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”

“This has to be the weirdest fucking conversation we’ve had in a long time, Steven. The absolute weirdest. And this is including that conversation we had with Thor a couple of months ago.”

He made a thoughtful sound and brought his hand up to tuck a stray curl behind her ear. “The reproductive habits of Bilgesnipes, right?”

“Yep,” she draped her legs over the arm of his chair, “-that’s the one.” She dropped her head against his shoulder and tucked herself into his jacket. For a few minutes the room was quiet save for the quiet beep-beep-beep of Bucky’s heart monitor until finally, she broke the silence with her next question. “Does the explanation for his survival have anything to do with the shifter thing?”

“He was always fairly quick to heal when we were kids, well, as much as any normal, healthy child is, anyway. After the shifting started, there wasn’t much that could keep him down. Wasn’t any harder to bust him open, but the bleeding would stop pretty quick and the bruises didn’t last all that long. Scars never really took after that, either.”

Darcy found herself watching the steady rise and fall of Bucky’s chest as the gravity of the situation hit her all at once. If Bucky had accelerated healing capabilities and wasn’t prone to scarring, what in the blue hell had they done to him? Why wasn’t he healing now and how the fuck was he covered in scars?

“Steve.”

His chest vibrated against her and he already seemed to know where she was headed next. His reply was shaky and she cuddled closer, attempting to comfort him. God knew he needed it. “I don’t know what they did to him, Darce, I don’t. I don’t know why his wounds aren’t healing. I don’t know if his healing on its own was good enough to survive that fall, but he did. Tony and Bruce are working their way through the shitload of data we found in that place to see if they can find anything…”

She lifted her head and tipped her face up to look at him. “I’m hearing an unspoken ‘but’.” His grimace confirmed her suspicions and she prodded him in the ribs with one finger. “What’s the ‘but’?”

“Stop saying ‘but’.” He chided, “The ‘ _but_ ’,” he pointedly quirked his eyebrow when she opened her mouth to interrupt and shook his head slightly, “-is that whatever enabled him to survive that fall may have happened _well_ before those files even existed. He could heal well enough before, but after Azzano? Well…”

Darcy wriggled and pulled herself upright, curled one arm around his neck and looked long and hard at Bucky. “You think they did something to him there?” Her eyes widened in fright. “ _Steve._ Steve, do you think they did something to him because they found out what he could do??”

“I don’t know,” his voice broke a little and shrugged helplessly. “I don’t _think_ they knew. He was pretty out of it when I found him, but he was him. He wasn’t in his ‘skin’.”

“His ‘skin’?”

“S’what we called it – bear skin. His ‘skin’. Made it easier to talk about around people who were flappin’ their ears around other people’s conversations. Us sneakin’ off alone into the woods as often as we did was dangerous as it was. Didn’t need to arouse any more suspicion than we already had.”

She nodded her understanding. “Fair point. Continue.”

“Before,” he paused to clarify, “-before the war, that is, his appetite was kinda crazy. He ate a lot. Mrs. Barnes always used to say he had a hollow leg. His little sister, Josie – it went Buck, Becca, Josie and Ruthie,” she was charmed by the way he counted each of the siblings off on his fingers as he went, “-she always had a book in her hand and as soon as she found out her brother was a bear sometimes, she pretty much devoured everything she could about them. Josie liked to say he ate so much because he was gettin’ fat for the winter. She was so confused when winter rolled around and he didn’t go into hibernation.”

Darcy’s laugh was small and delighted until it occurred to her that Bucky’s little sisters never stopped waiting for him to come home. Suddenly it wasn’t cute. Instead, it was really fucking sad.

 _Great_ , she thought, _now I’m gonna cry again_. She scrubbed at her eyes and Steve tucked himself around her and she nodded rapidly when he softly questioned if she was ok.

“M’ok. I’m fine, keep going.” She felt ridiculous. She didn’t even know Bucky or his sisters and here she was getting all upset on their behalf; not only did they never get to see their brother again, but they didn’t see Steve again, either. They’d all grown up together and neither man had returned home, so essentially, the girls had lost them both at once. “It’s ok, Steve. Keep going. Azzano. Appetite. Go.”

Before he could continue there was a loud, insistent beeping sound and they both startled. Steve was already halfway out of his seat before he remembered that Darcy was in his lap and she clung to him like a monkey, cussing up a storm even after he pulled her tight against him and bumbled his way through an apology.

“Shit! Sorry, sorry, shit, fuck, lemme just-” He carefully set her down on the edge of the bed beside Bucky and ran his hand over her hair, kissed the top of her head then skirted around the bed to see which of the alarms were wailing.

The gentle beep-beep-beep that the monitors had been making before, she could handle, but the louder, more insistent screech of the alarm made her grit her teeth and cringe. If it was affecting her this much, how much was it potentially upsetting Bucky?

She looked down to check on him, hoping to hell and back that he wasn’t too distressed by the racket and ready to cover his ears for him, but he didn’t seem to be aware of any of it. He was completely unaffected, hadn’t budged an inch, and it made her stomach clench uncomfortably.

Surely that noise wasn’t something he could ignore, right?

“Which one is it??” She refrained from cupping her hands over her own ears, but she couldn’t stop herself from wincing. “ _Steve!_ ”

“ _I don’t fucking know!”_ He was getting flustered and panicky and Darcy moved quickly to slap the ‘call nurse’ button. “How do I-“ he swore so colorfully that Darcy stared at him wide eyed, lips parted and clearly impressed by his creative vocabulary, “How the shitting _fuck_ do I mute this thing?!”

A throat cleared from the doorway and both spun to look at the newcomer. It was one of the nursing staff, an older woman in purple scrubs with white-streaked bright red hair whose expression screamed of disapproval. She was definitely someone’s grandmother, the long-suffering look on her face said it all. She had a set of keys attached to a clip on her waist and there was a large bag of “Steve Was Stupid” in her hand. Her name tag said “Celia”.

The alarm continued to wail.

“Would you care for some assistance, Captain Rogers?”

He continued to stare at her wide eyed and panicked. “What?”

Celia’s lips pursed and she waved him away from the machinery. “If you’d be so kind as to shift your behind out of the way, Captain, I can turn off the alarm.”

“Oh! I- Right. Uh, sorry.” He moved out of the way and slunk back to stand at Darcy’s side where she proceeded to turn a brilliant shade of red, trying to hold her nervous giggles at bay. He glowered at her. “Shut up.”

The alarm was promptly silenced and Steve quietly offered the nurse a red faced thank you. “Is he ok?” He asked, “Did that mean something’s wrong?”

She politely glossed over Steve’s blatant panic and checked over each monitor. “Everything looks fine, Captain-”

“Steve.”

Celia eyed him shrewdly, then softened once she realized how much the alarm had rattled him. “Steve. Everything looks fine. His vitals are good, he seems to be comfortable, he’s not in distress,” she set about switching out the empty nutrient bag for a full one, “-he’s resting. If you happen to be here and this happens again, which let’s be honest, it’s a virtual certainty, you need to keep your cool and press the call button. It was just an alert to let us know the bag of ‘Stupid’ needed changing.”

His face fell into a grumpy, sulky frown. “Why does everybody call them that?”

Both women answered in unison. “Because you’re stupid.”

His eyes bounced between the two and he scowled. “I’m not that bad.”

Darcy gave him a light pat on the butt. “Yes, sweetie,” she told him gently, “-you are.”

“I feel so attacked right now.”

She could feel the horrified look forming on her face. “Good god, don’t you dare.” She tugged him closer by his belt loops and wrapped her arm around his waist, “C’mere,” and they observed the process of checking over all the tubes and sticky-backed sensors that Bucky was hooked up to. While Celia was adjusting the monitor clamp on his finger, Steve carefully tucked Bucky’s tangled hair back behind his ears and made sure his nasal prongs hadn’t been disturbed.

There was so much care and affection in the simple gesture that Darcy’s chest grew tight and hot. She knew that Steve had loved Bucky forever, probably always would, and she had always been ok with that.

In theory.

Watching the way he fussed over his childhood sweetheart, right here, right now, Darcy wasn’t sure _how_ she felt. She knew that Steve loved her, knew it right down to her bones, but she also knew that she was meant to feel the hot, ugly weight of jealousy that any person would feel watching their significant other fawn over somebody else right in front of their face. She knew that she was supposed to be upset by the knowledge that her boyfriend was still completely gone for someone else.

Only, she wasn’t.

It was blatantly obvious that Steve still loved Bucky and she was confused. There was supposed to be a raging ball of resentment churning in her gut, she was meant to be angry at him for disrespecting their relationship to fawn over a past lover, but there was no ball of resentment. She wasn’t upset and she certainly wasn’t angry.

None of it felt wrong and she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that.

She was more unsettled by her lack of anger, hurt or jealousy than she was by the knowledge that Steve Rogers was still very much in love with Bucky Barnes.

The sound of the keys on Celia’s hip clinking against the end of the bed burst Darcy’s little brooding bubble and she blinked rapidly as the other woman reached for the clipboard that hung at the foot of the bed. Steve was back by her side and Darcy inwardly grimaced at how distracted she must have been that she’d missed him standing right next to her and, oh look, holding her hand.

Crap.

“Alright,” Celia studied the page in front of her, double, the triple checked her work, then initialed one of the tick-charts and hooked the board back onto the bed end. “All set. Another alert should go off in about three hours, just like the last one, and I’ll be back to check on him again. In the meantime, if anything happens and you think he might need help, just hit the button and someone will check in.”

“Is-” Steve started haltingly and Celia paused by the door, “Is he in pain right now?”

“I’d like to promise you that he isn’t, but unfortunately he’s not exactly up to telling us how he feels, so I can’t do that. What I _can_ tell you is that we are doing everything we can to keep him comfortable. I’m sorry I can’t give you a more concrete answer, Steve.”

He swallowed thickly and nodded. “Of course, I understand. Thank you.”

Once the door was closed again and they’d settled back into their seats by the bedside, Steve blindly reached for her again and she shuffle-hopped her chair closer. As soon as she was within reach Steve hooked his ankle around hers, looped their fingers together and squeezed them tight.

“He was hungry.”

It took a minute for Darcy to realize he was continuing the conversation they’d been having before the alarm had started screaming. “He was hungry?”

“After Azzano.” He ran his thumb across his bottom lip, deep in thought. “After Azzano, he was _always_ hungry.”


	4. Four.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Obviously, here be an update for you, and as always the standard blanket warnings apply - angst, feels, potentially upsetting/distressing content relating to Bucky's time at Camp Hydra.. You know, the usual.
> 
> I hope you guys are still enjoying this and I'm STILL blown away by the response to this - thank you all so very, very much!
> 
> (oh, and uh.. hand wavey science alert..)

“Do you know what he wants?”

Steve shook his head and stepped back to hold the door open for Darcy to walk through then followed after her. “I don’t know,” he answered. “What I do know is that Tony has summoned us to Bruce’s lab. Said he wants to talk to me about something and that I should probably bring you with me.”

Darcy made a considering sound. “Well, that doesn’t sound ominous _at all_.”

“Yeah,” he snorted. “Tell me about it.”

She glanced up at him, teeth digging into her lip. “Do you think it’s about the samples they took from Jamie the other day?”

Darcy had approached him days before, flustered and twitchy and he’d almost choked on his own panic. She’d been a little bit quiet since the night Bucky had arrived at the compound and he was worried that he’d done something to upset or offend her, wracking his brain as he went over every interaction they’d had since and which, if any, of them he’d bumbled; he’d thought she was going to tell him that the whole Bucky-bear mess was too much and break up with him.

When she’d started nervously rambling about how she didn’t feel comfortable calling Bucky by that particular nickname, however, he’d been completely bewildered.

“Bucky” was _his_ name for him, she’d explained, something that was and had always been only for them and using it felt like she was stomping all over something deeply personal.

He’d started to argue that wasn’t the case at all, plenty of people had called him Bucky over the years, but then he stopped to think about it and he struggled to come up with more than the odd person here or there. Sure, people had referred to him as such in passing, but when they’d _tried_ to call him Bucky to his face, they’d only ever tried it the once. The Howlies had only ever referred to him as _Sarge_ or _Barnes_ and his parents had called him James. He’d always been incredibly indulgent about letting his sisters call him “Bucket” though, even well into adulthood.

Eventually, and it had taken a good few minutes of wracking his brain, he’d come to the startling realization that Darcy was right; Bucky never _had_ liked anybody else calling him by the nickname Steve had given him. _“I,”_ swallowing past the lump in his throat had been painful, _“I guess I’ve never really been as observant as people think I am, huh?”_ Darcy’d stepped up to him and he dropped his head against her hip with a shaky sigh as her fingers started carding through his hair.

 _“Do you get it now? If he didn’t like other people calling him that, Steve, then it was important to him, and if it’s important to him, I’m not going to insult him by ignoring that.”_ She’d dragged her fingernails down the edge of his jaw and they’d scraped over the thick stubble there with a rasp, a warm curl to her lips. _“Now, help a girl out; how do you think he’d feel about Boo-boo? No? What about Smolder The Bear?... from Timon and Pumb- The Lion King? You don’t know what The Lion Ki- my god, Steve, what the hell are you doing in your spare time?! It’s a cinematic masterpiece! How the hell haven’t you – I’ve failed you. I have **failed** you, Steven!”_

Eventually, once her Disney related tangent had passed and after countless suggestions that grew more and more outrageous than the last, they’d settled on “Jamie”. It was a nice, normal nickname that had no prior sentimental associations; he was relieved to see that she was much more settled after that.

She spent a lot of time sitting with Bucky when he himself was unable to; he hated it, but he had to eat, shower and sleep sometimes. In all honesty, Darcy had unceremoniously booted him from the room and had threatened to banish him to the balcony overnight _indefinitely_ if he didn’t go home and get some rest. The last time he’d returned to the suite after his daily banishment he’d pulled up short outside the door, eyes instantly glassy as he listened to his girl reading aloud to an unresponsive Bucky, her voice low and steady, music playing quietly in the background.

When he’d finally figured out what she was reading to him he’d teared up all over again; Steve had known the very first time he’d read _‘The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy’_ that Bucky would have loved it. He’d mentioned it to Darcy in passing once, barely even a sidenote to a conversation they’d had well before he’d even known Bucky was still alive, but obviously she’d remembered.

She’d occasionally pause to comment on something, wait for a non-existent reply, then continued on as though they were in the midst of an in-depth conversation. When he’d questioned her on it, she’d fixed him with an unimpressed pout.

*

_“He might not be able to reply right now, Steven, but I know that if I was in his position and there was a chance that I could hear things – even if I couldn’t respond – I’d much rather have someone talking to me than being forced to lay there in silence. He’s had enough of silence, Steve. Now, you can either leave, or you can sit your ass down and listen to wonder that is 80s hair metal with us.”_

_After a further ten minutes; “Sweetheart, this is awful.”_

_“… It’s like I don’t even know who you are anymore.”_

_*_

Darcy offered her hand as they reached the door of Bruce’s lab and he took it, glad to have an anchor of sorts. He had no idea what they were walking into and his stomach was starting to knot. “Tony didn’t say, but yeah, probably.”

It took Bruce a few minutes to even register their presence, despite them announcing themselves.

“Oh! Hey guys,” Bruce sounded exhausted. Looked it too, like he hadn’t slept in the past three days. Knowing Bruce as well as he did, Steve suspected that he probably hadn’t. Knowing Bruce, he’d probably dived head-first into the mass of liberated data as soon as he’d had the chance and was only just now surfacing, thus, one very frazzled, rumpled scientist. “Uh, _oh crap_ , I’m sorry. Here, let me just-” he scooped up a whole stack of papers from a nearby chair and didn’t seem to notice when half of them slipped free of the pile, “Sit, sit. Have a seat. Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you to get here so fast.”

As the lost handful of papers scattered across the floor, Darcy gave his arm a sharp tug and jerked her chin in Bruce’s direction, wide eyed and very clearly mouthed _‘what the fuck is going on?’._ All he could do was shrug helplessly back. He really didn’t have a clue, but it was making him nervous.

“Are you ok, Bruce?” He asked as he nudged Darcy in the direction of the chair. There was only the one available and she’d been on her feet in Jane’s lab for most of the day already, he wasn’t about to make her stand up for whatever this was. He was ok with leaning up against one of the nearby desks.

He absently held the chair steady for her as she sat down, one eye on Bruce’s fluttering and one on her to make sure she didn’t miss her mark. She pointedly reached for his hand again as soon as she was seated and even though he hadn’t said anything, he knew that she’d picked up on his growing anxiety.

She very politely didn’t acknowledge his sweaty palms.

Bruce scratched at his eyebrow and grimaced. “I wouldn’t say _‘ok’_ is anywhere near what I am right now.” He took a large mouthful of tea from a nearby mug and judging from the disgusted way his mouth twisted, it was cold. “I’ll explain in a minute,” he promised, “we’re just waiting on Tony.”

Darcy sat up a little straighter. “Did you find something in the data that might help us figure out how to help Jamie?” She asked.

“Oh, we found something, alright,” Tony seemingly appeared out of nowhere, eyes fixed on the tablet in his hand. He stopped directly opposite Steve, pulled himself up to sit on the desk and with a flick of his wrist a large holo-screen lit up between them. “So, do we want to start with the interesting-but-not-so-fun part, or the really-not-fun part?”

There were three charts side by side on the holo-screen and Steve was still trying to figure out what the hell was going on when Darcy, eyes fixed on the screen in front of them, wiggled her hand free. “This chart on the left,” she asked as she rose to her feet, reached out and traced her finger along the genome sequence, “this is Steve’s, right?”

Tony looked mildly impressed, “Gold star for Butterball!”

Steve grit his teeth so hard that his head hurt; he fucking hated it when Tony called her that, wanted to knock those million dollar teeth out of that million dollar mouth, but Darcy merely continued to study the genome sequence in front of her. The next thing out of her mouth shouldn’t have made him weak-kneed, but it really did.

“Tony, we’ve talked about this,” she told him airily, “Calling me _Butterball_ is not only impolite, it’s also inappropriate. If you call me that again, I’ll have JARVIS disable the sprinkler systems and I’ll set you on fire.”

Christ, he loved this woman.

“God, you’re savage,” Tony breathed, awed and Steve wanted to slap him clean into next week; only he was allowed to like that about her, Tony needed to shut his damn mouth. “I know I shouldn’t be, but I think I’m a little turned on right now. I don’t think I’ve ever been turned on by someone threatening to set me on fire before and it’s making me mildly uncomfortable. Or maybe it’s _not_ discomfort and I’m actually just confused, yet aroused?”

Bruce looked perturbed by the entire exchange. “This whole _conversation_ is making me uncomfortable and judging from the look on his face, Tony, Steve is about to make _you_ very uncomfortable.” He pointed out. “Could we possibly get back on track here? Please?” Tony opened his mouth, no doubt preparing to say something else that was entirely inappropriate, but Bruce stopped him dead. “Two words, Tony; _Pepper. Potts_.”

The billionaire’s mouth snapped shut and he visibly squirmed, cleared his throat and tapped something on his tablet. “As you can see here, this genome on the left belongs to Spangles,” the chart in question lit up yellow. He tapped the tablet again and the middle one lit up, backlit in blue. “And this one belongs to Little Miss Warbird, here.”

_“Fuckssake, Tony!”_

The other man let out a slightly manic giggle-snort and continued as though he hadn’t even heard Steve’s snarled outburst, “If you look at them side by side,” Tony pointed from one chart to the other, “this, _Darcy’s chart_ , is what your run of the mill unenhanced individual’s DNA looks like. This,” he gestured to the yellow chart, “ _Steve’s chart_ , is what an individual with genetic enhancement’s looks like. Can you see how the markers _here, here_ and _here_ are different?”

After a quick study and a glance at Darcy to make sure she was following, Steve nodded. They were clearly different and Bruce quickly explained that the serum was the reason for it before the other man started prattling on again.

Tony clapped his hands together. “Right, wonderful, now that’s explained, it makes this a whole lot easier,” He dragged up the final chart and it lit up orange. “This is Bucky-bear’s.” His gaze turned sharp. “Tell me, Cap – can you see anything unusual going on here?”

Steve glanced over at Bruce warily to make sure that he wasn’t walking into something that had been engineered to humiliate him, then stepped forward to study the backlit charts closer after Bruce gave him the go-ahead.

He wasn’t entirely sure what he was meant to be looking for. He was, at the heart of him, an artist, not a scientist. He could spot the differences between his own chart and Darcy’s, they were blatantly obvious once they’d been pointed out to him, but how was he supposed to spot anything usual within Bucky’s results when, for the most part, they looked just like his ow-

 _Wait_ , he thought as he straightened, eyes narrowed. _Wait a fucking minute._

Bucky’s results looked eerily like his own. There were differences, of course there were, they weren’t related, no shared familial blood between them (thank Christ), but the similarities that _were_ there? _Those shouldn’t exist._

James Buchanan Barnes was, and had always been, one hundred percent human (the standardized blood tests he’d had before he’d shipped out confirmed it). No genetic abnormalities, not even a vague hint of him being anything other than your average guy, from your average family. He was completely unremarkable.

You know, except for the whole, _‘I can turn into a bear when I feel like it’_ thing.

He’d been crapping himself about the tests, convinced that the army would find out he was different and drag him off somewhere and lock him up, but the results had come back clear and nobody was any the wiser. Granted, it was the forties and pathology wasn’t exactly as advanced as it was now, but it had still been a legitimate concern.

“Can I just...?” He swiped his hand across the screen and flipped the charts so that his own and Bucky’s were side by side. He compared the two, glanced back to Darcy’s just to be sure that he was seeing what he thought he was seeing, then he let loose with a string of curses that was almost as long as his arm in four separate languages. Bruce and Tony looked startled at his outburst, but Darcy didn’t look surprised in the least. She shouldn’t; she’d heard worse from him on a regular basis. “ _Sonofa-goddamn-filthy-motherless-fucking goat_ -“ he took a steadying breath and grit his teeth, “You have _got_ to be fucking _kidding_ me.”

Darcy appeared at his side, unruffled by the multi-lingual cussing but completely thrown by the vehemence of it. “Steve? Baby, what is it?” Her hand found the small of his back and although the firm circling of her palm was normally a source of comfort, he was unable to focus on it due to his racing thoughts.

His field of vision narrowed and his heart started to skip double time, hot acid churning in gut. How was this missed? Bucky’d been thoroughly checked over after the 107th had made it back to camp and there had been mutterings about sending him home, but Bucky wasn’t having a bar of it. The only way they’d been able to convince the brass to let him stay was if Howard agreed to oversee his exam himself, to screen his results for anything out of the ordinary. They’d had to make sure that he was healthy enough to remain on the front and even though he wasn’t a medical doctor, technically just an engineer and inventor, they’d insisted and after a week of things being up in the air, Howard fucking Stark had given him the all clear.

Steve flung a manic, incredulous look at the two geniuses who were hanging back, watching it all unfold and he took a slow menacing step toward Tony. Despite her attempts to hold onto his shirt, Darcy’s hand slipped away from his back. “ _Did you know?!_ ” He demanded. “Did you _know_ what they did to him?!”

“What the hell are you talking about?!”

“He told us there was nothing in there to find!”

Stark steadfastly refused to back down. “You’re making absolutely no sense,” he snapped. “ _Who_ told you _what_ wasn’t there??”

“ _HOWARD!”_ Tony flinched at the sound of his bellowed reply and Steve immediately grew horrified by the way the other man’s gaze grew shuttered and even more so by his own behaviour. “ _Fuck,”_ his chest was heaving, hands trembling, and he took a long step back and purposely loosened his shoulders. “Fuck,” he repeated as he calmed, voice shaky. His head was pounding. “Jesus, Tony, I-” his face crumpled into a miserable grimace and one by one the other people in the room started to unclench. “This isn’t on you, Tony. _I’m sorry_. Sorry Bruce, Darcy. M’sorry.”

Bruce was surprisingly calm, absently cleaning his glasses on a rag he’d grabbed from a nearby table. He checked the lenses, squinted at the greasy engine-oil smears on them and shot Tony an irritated side-eye that wasn’t even acknowledged. “You’re fine, Steve. It’s a hell of a shock, I’m sure.”

Tony’s tense stance had loosened and instead of confused, his gaze was now considering. “Howard’d looked over Barnes’s test results before?” He pressed. “He looked at the report way back when and told you that there was nothing unusual going on? He didn’t care to mention that these changes, and they _are_ changes because I’ve snuck a peek at Barnes’s original screens-”

Bruce let out a muffled curse. “Tony, have you been hacking classified government records again??”

“Well, if they wanted to keep people out, they wouldn’t make it so easy to get in, would they, Brucie? Now, shh, the adults are talking.” He ignored Bruce’s indignant spluttering and continued, unaffected. “Howard saw _this,_ ” he jabbed a finger in the direction of the orange hued read-out on the holo-screen, “-and he didn’t notice and or tell you that Barnes was experiencing some serious changes on a cellular level?”

Steve shook his head mutely, afraid that if he opened his mouth he’d fuck up again. God, his head _really_ hurt now.

Tony eyeballed him for a long moment, glanced at the screen, then settled his dark eyed gaze back on the blond. “Well, that was a prick-ish thing for him to do, wasn’t it?”

In all of this, Darcy had remained quiet, hanging back and observing the chaos. “So,” her voice was muffled by the fact that he still had her thumbnail wedged between her teeth, “for those of us plebs who aren’t a genius or have multiple scientific PhD’s _or_ an eidetic memory with the ability to spot a freckle on a sparrow’s ass at ten klicks, what the hell is going on with,” her hand waved vaguely in the direction of the cause of the entire drama, “- _this._ ”

“Hydra were experimenting on some of the prisoners in Azzano,” Steve explained, suddenly exhausted. He knew now why Tony had suggested that he might want Darcy to tag along when he came to the lab; Stark knew enough to know that he was going to need her support. He was grateful for the other man’s consideration, even if he could be an irritating shithead at times. “After they were taken away to the isolation ward and given to Zola, most of them ended up dead within the first five or six hours. Bucky was taken, but he didn’t die. Zola had been playing with him for days by the time I got to him. He couldn’t remember how long he’d been there, he just said that there was a weird smell, gas of some kind, and then he woke up strapped to a table and everything felt like it was burning.”

“That’ll be the serum.”

Darcy blinked rapidly and shook her head in disbelief, “S’cuse me, what?”

Steve’s eyes fell shut and his head dropped back to face the ceiling. How the fuck hadn’t he put two and two together? He was so hell-bent on getting Bucky back and making sure he kept him close that he’d been blind to everything else, that’s how. He should have noticed there was something off about him. Bucky was his partner in every way that he could be, this is something that he should have noticed.

God, he’d been so fucking selfish.

Tony’s sympathetic hum snapped him out of the mental bashing he was giving himself.

“Yeah,” Tony drawled. “Pretty sure HYDRA injected Barnes with their own bastardized version of the serum. Looks like Bucky-bear is a super-ted now.”

Silence.

 _“For the love of god, Tony, do you even have an off switch?”_ This time it was Darcy voicing her disapproval.

“… Too soon?”

Steve squinted at him, irritated but resigned to the younger Stark’s behaviour. He held his fingers up, pinching the air in front of him. “Li’l bit.”

“Huh.” He blinked twice, “My bad.” He flicked his fingers at the holo-screen again and now only Steve’s results remained, enlarged for easier visibility. “So, here’s what we know. When Steven here was injected with Erskine’s serum, the procedure was completed by exposing him to a type of radiation known as vita-radiation – or, vita-rays, as we all know them. Now,” he highlighted a section of the genome on the screen, expanded it out, “when the serum was exposed to the radiation it acted as a stabilizing agent for a series of cellular changes, mutations, however you want to describe it and wham-bam-thankyou ma’am, congratulations, it’s a Steve.”

Steve eyeballed Tony and shook his head, resigned. “God, you’re an asshole. Have you been told that today, Stark? Because if you haven’t, somebody’s missed a golden opportunity.”

“Actually,” he chirped, “I have. But still, it’s always nice to be noticed. I’m flattered, Spangles.”

Bruce groaned and turned to Darcy, rolled his eyes and continued with the explanation as though he’d been the one delivering it the whole time. “We know that Steve experienced some significant alterations, height, weight, his physical ailments were no longer an issue, but what we don’t know is how many of those alterations occurred so rapidly because of the serum alone, or if it was the exposure to the radiation that sped things along.” He gave Darcy a small, kind smile. “Is this making sense so far?”

She peered up at the screen and glanced over to Bruce, then back again. “Could’ve been the serum alone, could’ve been a side effect of the combination of the two – yes?”

“Yes.”

She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and started chewing on it. “Ok, so what does that have to do with Jamie?”

“Well,” Bruce looked completely unruffled by the new nickname, “We’ve scoured through the data we have relating to Barnes, all the way back to the forties,” his expression darkened for a split second, “and we haven’t been able to find any mention whatsoever of him being exposed to radiation after being given his version of the serum. We don’t know whether it was just a lack of opportunity, what with Steve liberating Barnes from Azzano before they had the chance, or if it was a more organic process.” Darcy opened her mouth to question him, visibly frustrated by the convoluted explanation, “ _My point being_ ,” he hurried to explain, “is that we have documented evidence of how Steve’s cells were altered by the serum, how quickly it happened and what the end result was, but we don’t know what changes Barnes went through because there was nothing documented until after HYDRA found him in the Alps. Nothing in depth enough to really analyse properly, anyway. The fact that he was still alive tells us that the process was already underway, as do the basic bloods taken after he was freed from Azzano, but we don’t know how long the entire process took or whether his body can do the same things that Steve’s can.”

Back in the game, Steve finally caught up with the conversation. “He was always a fast healer,” he insisted, “He always healed fast and he never had a mark to show for it, so why isn’t he healing now and why is he covered in scars? If he has some form of the serum, surely that would be something they’d make sure it’d cover.”

Tony and Bruce shared an uneasy look that immediately made his spine stiffen. _Jesus Christ_ , he thought, _what now? What the hell did they find in those files that could make them cringe like that?_

Darcy straightened out of the corner of his eye and her arms unfolded from around her waist. Judging from the suspicious squint of her eyes, she seemed to be thinking something similar. “What?” She questioned warily. “What was that look?”

Bruce grimaced and Tony scratched at his eyebrow, eyes fixed on the floor. “Well,” he started, “His ability to heal isn’t _exactly_ an issue.”

Something cold bolted through his veins and a heavy, smothering weight settled on his chest. “What-” He croaked. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Darcy’s hand slipped into his and he clung to her even tighter when Bruce dragged a couple of chairs over and Tony gestured to them with a tired, resigned look on his face.

“You, uh,” he rubbed his hands over his face and swore with a muttered _‘Jesus, I’m not drunk enough for this’_ under his breath. “You might wanna take a seat.”

***

_March 10 th, 1945 – 09:46. _

_re: file 03/07/45 – Code:WS - RoRH. Procedure successful, subject maintained consciousness throughout (*#1.). Restraints required pre and post-surgery due to increasing distress and arterial bleeding respectively. Symptoms of circulatory shock. Fluids administered, blood pressure stabilized. Signs of coagulation within three minutes of removal, granulation within twelve (*#2, 3) as opposed to previous results of six and twenty minutes respectively. Returned to holding for further observation. Revisit in twelve hours._

_ DAY #3. - 68HRS POST SURGERY  _

_It is sixty-eight hours post-procedure and the subject appears to recovering at an accelerated rate. Despite continued refusal to eat, the subject continues to show signs of increasing regeneration and healing of connective tissues (regrowth of carpals complete within four hours (*#4), metacarpals within nine (*#5), proximal/middle/distal phalanges within sixteen hours (*#6), ligament, tendon, soft tissues within thirty. Epidermal regrowth complete within forty hours)._

_Gross motor skills satisfactory._

_Fine motor skills unsatisfactory, requires attention. Re-examine in six hours._

_Subject remains argumentative and aggressive. Further treatment required to attain compliance._

_** Photographic documentation of progress located under Code:WS – subject “J.B.B”_

***

Two days later found Darcy curled up in the newly installed reclining chair to the right of Bucky’s bed. It was a shade of orange that was so hideous that it was actually offensive, but it was oversized, super squishy and so, so comfortable that it _kind of_ made up for the ugly. Ok, nothing could possibly make up for the ugly, but the chair’s squishy factor got points for trying.

There was a mess of barely legible handwritten notes around her, junk food wrappers were stuffed down either side of the chair and an untouched jumbo-sized cup of lychee bubble tea sat on the bedside cabinet in a ring of its own condensation. Jane had dropped by almost an hour ago with another stack of paperwork and the aforementioned drink – Darcy didn’t have the heart to tell Jane that she was actually allergic to lychees (nor did she like bubble tea). She was just trying to do something nice for her and it _was_ a nice gesture, so she’d smiled and said thank you and Jane had skipped back to her lab, pleased as punch.

She should _probably_ mention the allergy thing to her later.

She was meant to be working, had her laptop powered up, stacks of Jane’s notes ready to transcribe – she really needed to encourage her to slow down a little, her writing was starting to resemble hieroglyphics that had been written by a chicken again – and the little cursor was patiently flashing at her on the computer screen, but every time she’d try to knuckle down and get some work done she’d catch sight of the silvery stripes along Bucky’s fingers and all of her work-related motivation just… fizzled out and died.

There was no concentrating to be done when all she could think about was how he’d gotten them, all those neat, tidy, shiny lines that crawled from the tips of his fingers all the way to his upper biceps.

In amongst all the data that’d already been unpacked and translated and all that other fun stuff (there was still a decent sized chunk to go through), there had been _hours_ of video footage.

From grainy three minute clips of a filthy sneering (one armed) Bucky Barnes spitting and swearing at someone out of frame, to a series of video journals featuring an exceedingly giddy scientist of sorts who was virtually bouncing in her seat because _‘this is so exciting, The Prisoner’s arm is growing back’_ and ‘ _there are so many possibilities’_ …

Darcy suspected that the woman was well dead by now, but that didn’t make the desire to track her down and shove her into an active volcano any less urgent. Steve had grown incredibly pale upon hearing ‘ _growing back’_ and ‘ _so exciting’_ and when the scientist had stopped referring to Bucky as ‘The Prisoner’ and started calling him ‘The Subject’ he’d started outright shaking. Darcy knew whatever they’d been about to see had to be bad when Tony slid off his perch and returned a moment later with a bottle of scotch. She knew it was going to be awful, but she hadn’t been prepared for just how awful.

In the first ‘procedural recording’, they’d cut his hand off. With no anaesthesia or pain relief.

He was awake and they’d cut off his hand just so they could see how long it would take for the damaged limb/body part to regenerate and grow back and they hadn’t just stopped there.

They’d wanted to know whether he could be a possible candidate for an upcoming project, if he was capable of withstanding significant physical damage and could recover at an acceptable speed so they could re-deploy him quickly.

They wanted to break him down piece by piece, literally, it seemed, before they could then train him to do their dirty work.

Darcy still wasn’t sure if she was ashamed of how much she’d thrown up or not. On one hand, she’d had no idea there’d still been that much left in her stomach, apparently she’d eaten a whole lot more in the twenty four hours prior to viewing that shit than she’d thought and, well, it was kind of a waste of food.

_On the other hand…_

There were just some things that you wish you could un-hear and unsee, and everything she’d heard and seen in Bruce’s lab after Tony’s ominous ‘you might want to sit’ statement were both of those. She could’ve done without seeing the reports and the pictures and the grainy footage of a pale, panicked Bucky being strapped down and hurt, over and over. She could’ve done without hearing him scream bloody murder until all he could choke out were parts of his service number and name through hysterical sobs and retching.

She could’ve done without his sudden jarring silence.

The silence felt worse than the screaming.

What _was_ worse, was the footage of what could only be Bucky in his Skins, as Steve called it. Bucky-bear had started appearing in the footage sometime after 1947 (if the time and date stamp were to be believed). She’d already been throwing up into one of Bruce’s many cheerful yellow bio-hazard bins by the time they’d reached them, hard enough that she’d ruptured some of the little blood vessels in the back of her throat so she was spitting up blood now and then.

She hadn’t seen Bucky in animal form until then and she’d been momentarily struck dumb by the sight of him; he was massive, just like Steve’d said, and despite his obvious loss of condition, he was absolutely fucking stunning. His front left leg was mottled and swirled with a pewter gray dapple from his paw to shoulder and the rest of his fur was a rich chocolate brown, darker around his eyes and muzzle. Even in the poor quality video footage, Darcy could see the stark, pale gleam of his eyes and the four sets of devastatingly sharp claws. He painted an intimidating picture. Beautiful, no doubt, but intimidating.

Objectively, Darcy knew that bears were big. After the conversation she’d had with Steve about ‘Bucky’s a bear’ she might’ve gone into research-demon mode; It wasn’t a crime to want a little bit of background knowledge, ok? She was well within her rights to be curious. Yes, Bucky wasn’t an actual bear so there were sure to be differences between the shifter and the mammals, but at the very least the information available online could give her some vague indication of size, right?

The information had lied to her. The information had lied so much that the information’s grandbabies and their grandbabies after those would be liars, too.

He was, hands down, the largest animal she’d ever seen – that weird dino-dog thing that had been bounding around London during the dark elf shit-show didn’t count. Even though the shaky video footage was grainy and poor quality, it was blatantly obvious that Bucky in bear form was a goddamn behemoth.

Despite being momentarily dazzled, it hadn’t taken her long to realize something was incredibly wrong with on-screen Bucky’s behaviour. The way he was pressed against the wall all docile-like, apparently drugged, was strange. He was too quiet, too still. By the time she’d opened her mouth to comment on it, everything on the screen had gone to shit.

There’d been people in white coats moseying back and forth one minute, Bucky-bear supposedly pliant and submissive, then one of the lab-lackeys wandered too close and chaos erupted. There was a sharp wailing scream, heavily armed guards flooding into the room shouting something in what sounded like Russian (Bruce quietly confirmed that it was) and there was Bucky with the lackey pinned down underneath one huge paw, claws dug deep into his belly, mouth stretched open in a bloody, raging snarl.

There was increasingly aggressive shouting, an animalistic bellow of pain that melted into a human scream and what do you know, more breakfast in a bucket…

There was more throwing up after that, just for good measure; she wasn’t sure how there’d been anything left by that stage, but as horrible as witnessing all of that had been for her, it’d been ten time worse for Steve.

Calming him down enough to get him back to their place had been a process that had taken a while, but between herself and Tony (plus the suit, because Steve legitimately weighed more than a baby elephant) they’d finally managed to haul his heavy ass home. Tony’s insistence to take him straight into the bedroom had made much more sense after he’d produced a medium sized flask, silver with fancy blue knotwork engraved into the surface of the metal, and had nudged it into Steve’s hand with a murmured explanation of “Asgardian booze”.

 _“It’ll help him sleep,”_ he’d explained quietly as they’d watched the blond drink deep and tipped his chin at him, _“I know he wants to go to Barnes, but he can’t, not right now and not like this. Even if the guy can’t see or hear him, he’s in a hell of a state. Barnes’ll still be there tomorrow, he can go see him then,”_ he’d said as he gave her a comforting squeeze. The rare show of affection had only made her sniffle even harder, _“Take that off him soon. I’ll be with Pep if you need anything.”_

That night had been rough and though Steve was good and drunk, out like a log, she hadn’t slept a wink.

The next morning, when Steve was just out of the shower and she was waiting for him to get dressed so they could head down to medical, JARVIS had reluctantly chimed through with a call-out – SHIELD related – and whoever Clint’s source was had said not to tell SHIELD anything about Bucky, so he had no choice. As much as he didn’t want to leave without seeing him first, refusing to go would only look suspicious and risk exposing Bucky’s presence at the compound. Darcy had promised to spend some time with him and Steve had grudgingly packed a bag. It was less than twenty minutes from the call-out to him being in the air and that was that.

He wasn’t due back for at least a few days and Jane assured her that they weren’t doing anything terribly urgent or important (she knew she was lying, Jane tended to roll her lip and pop her P’s when she lied, but the scientist was so incredibly out of her depth with the whole situation and wasn’t sure how to help, so she was willing to allow Darcy anything). So, given the all clear, Darcy packed up her laptop, any loose data that needed logging, grabbed a bag full of snacks and took herself to Bucky’s room to set up camp.

As soon as she had everything set up just the way she liked it, Darcy had queued up an audio book, Jurassic Park, this time – gotta love some killer dinosaurs – and settled in to get some work done. Or at least that had been the plan.

Even when he was catatonic and dangerously unwell, Bucky Barnes was hard to ignore.

“I don’t know how you did it, Jamie,” Darcy sighed and ran a tentative finger across the shiny raised scar over his wrist before carefully turning his hand over to look at the patchwork of scars on his fingers and palm. There wasn’t even a blip on the heart monitor to say he’d registered her touch. “I don’t know how you didn’t just lay down and give up.” God, the things they’d done to him.

The monitors continued their steady beep-beep-beep and Darcy sighed. She gave his hand a careful squeeze and dragged her laptop closer. “Better try to get some work done,” she scrounged for a pen and her glasses and eyeballed the rapidly warming cup of bubble tea with no small amount of disgust. “Don’t suppose I could interest you in a bucket-sized cup of room temperature lychee flavoured weirdness?” She snorted to herself at the responding silence. “Yeah, can’t say I blame you.” She shook her head and tried to make sense of the numbers scrawled on the coffee-stained scrap of paper in front of her. “Bring on Saturday, Jamie. Bring on Saturday.”


	5. Five.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look who's alive!!!!
> 
> So, it's been a while, but hopefully you guys are still with me... I'm really sorry for the delay in updating but the past few months have been reeeeeeally weird to say the least, right?
> 
> Fingers crossed for continued cooperation from the muses!

Three weeks later, when Jane had taken time out of her workday to swing by with some food for them, the metaphorical lightbulb went off over Steve’s head. 

“Thanks for this, Jane,” Steve was already digging through the random boxes of takeout Jane had brought them. He stuffed a handful of fries into his mouth, chewed quickly and swallowed. “I really appreciate it,” he glanced over at Darcy, sequestered away in the corner with her headphones on, brows furrowed as she furiously scribbled out notes from the video footage one of Jane’s latest teleconferences. “I know I’ve stolen her away from you for the past few weeks and I’m sorry for any inconveni-”

“ _Steve_ ,” her glare made his mouth snap shut mid-word. “You haven’t inconvenienced me at all. I got things done before Darcy tripped into my life, it just took a little longer and looked a little messier,” she admitted and his answering snort made her flush. “Ok, it looked _a lot_ messier. Shut up. I can muddle along for now. As for stealing her away from me,” Jane’s expression was equal parts affectionate and ‘you’re an idiot’, “you know she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t want to be, Steve. She’s perfectly capable of making her own decisions and if Darcy thinks this is where she needs to be, then this is where she needs to be.”

Steve nodded mutely and looked at the paper wrapped sandwich in his hand. “I know that, Jane, I do.” He glanced over to where his girlfriend was bent over her laptop, tongue poking out at the corner of her mouth and squinting. “I just feel guilty that she’s giving up all of her time to look after me–after _us_. There’s so many other things she should and could be doing, instead she’s either running around after doctors, hassling them about Bucky’s test results or fussing over whether I’m eating or sleeping enough and I worry that she’s running herself into the ground for something that might-” his words caught in his throat and he swallowed hard, “This could be as good as he gets.”

Bucky had filled out thanks to the high calorie supplements they’d put him on and his face wasn’t as gaunt as it had been mere weeks ago, but his skin was still pale as can be. His eyelashes looked like dark streaks of ink fanned out over the bruised circles under his closed eyes. He was nowhere near as thin as he’d been when they’d found him, and the daily physiotherapy regimen that had been implemented a little over two weeks ago seemed to agree with him. It wasn’t much, just some gentle stretches to help stimulate fresh muscle growth and to prevent any further wastage of the pre-existing tissues, followed by the careful manipulation of his joints so they didn’t seize up. His muscle tone was improving and he was regaining weight. It was nowhere near enough to get him out of the woods, but it was _something_.

The neurologist in charge of the team overseeing his treatment had told them that the catatonia could last days, weeks or even months; the thought of Bucky potentially being trapped inside his own head for that long made him feel sick.

But then the PET scans showed the unexpected; whatever serum Bucky had running through him was doing its job. If the increased activity they were seeing with each new scan was to be believed, his brain seemed to be repairing itself.

PET scans were being performed every second day to monitor his progress and even though the results were increasingly promising, he still wasn’t showing signs of ‘waking up’.

Steve didn’t know if he wasn’t waking up because he wasn’t able to, or if he wasn’t waking up because he just didn’t _want_ to.

He wasn’t sure which option was worse.

Then again, after the debacle a few days earlier he couldn’t exactly blame him if he didn’t want to come out and play. He wouldn’t want to, either; Steve was _still_ furious about it.

One of the doctors – _who was not a member of the team overseeing his treatment_ – had, in his infinite wisdom, taken it upon himself to perform a series of pin-prick tests on Bucky. He’d wanted to see if there were any signs of response to physical stimuli yet and as soon as the needle had punctured the sole of his foot, the monitors that Tony and Bruce had cooked up and had hooked Bucky up to had lit up like the fourth of July.

The nurses had been gracious enough to allow him access to their break room these past few weeks and Steve had been mid yawn, half-heartedly arguing with their coffee maker when the alarms started wailing. He’d poked his head out the break room door and when he’d seen the red light above Bucky’s door flashing, he’d made it back down the hall in record time. There was no telling what the alert was for, so his heart was in his throat and his stomach full of lead. It could have been something simple, maybe a loose sensor, or on the flip side, it could have been because he’d flatlined. Either way, something was wrong and Steve had somehow ended up at his destination without knocking anybody over.

Upon re-entering the room he’d found four white coats crowded around at the end of Bucky’s bed, another three either side and the blankets were flipped up to his knees, his pale feet exposed.

That doctor – the one who _wasn’t_ one of his approved neurologists – was bent over him with a hand wrapped around his ankle. The joint still looked painfully delicate and it was striped in the same silvery scars that his arms were. There was a long, sharp needle millimetres away from stabbing into the heel of his right foot.

Bucky wasn’t outwardly reacting, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that he was distressed. He wasn’t flinching away, he didn’t have a pinched expression on his face and none of his muscles were tensed, but Steve _knew_ in his gut that Bucky wasn’t happy.

 _He_ wasn’t happy.

Bright blooms of red, yellow and green had exploded across the monitors and that sanctimonious bastard quack of a doctor – _who wouldn’t have a valid registration for much longer_ – had brushed aside Steve’s protests and insisted that the reaction was a good thing, it proved he could feel physical sensation and then he’d jabbed him with the needle _again._

This time the needle sank into the arch of his foot, right next to an old pre-existing scar that _they_ had left on him.

It ran from heel to toe, a quarter inch thick and it made Steve sick to his stomach knowing that they’d put it there to keep him from running. That even if he’d somehow freed himself, his feet would’ve been such a mess that he wouldn’t have been able to get far anyway.

Bruce and Tony had set up a holo-screen with an inbuilt neuro-link above Bucky’s bed. It was so they could monitor all new brain activity in real time and it had been designed so there was no need for physical contact between the scanner and Bucky’s head, just a little sticker on his temple that relayed data from his brain to the scanner.

_“Just a little something we threw together. Real last minute. Didn’t even have to fabricate any new parts.”_

_Bullshit,_ it was a “last minute” thing.

Steve was willing to bet that the two of them had not only been working on it for days, possibly weeks, but they’d more than likely consulted with _multiple_ top-of-their-field medical professionals to make sure their concept was viable. He also suspected that they’d also been running themselves ragged to get the thing made as quickly as possible, too.

Normally, watching the swirls and pulses of colour that bloomed throughout all the different nooks and crannies of Bucky’s brain was fascinating. It was like watching a lava lamp for the first time, but when that needle pushed into his foot the second time and that screen lit up like a sky full of fireworks fascination had rapidly morphed into fury.

Steve had thrown an epic rage-tantrum that would put the Hulk to shame.

How the flying fuck could anyone ever think subjecting someone who had been physically tortured for years to any kind of pain related test was a good idea?! In what universe was that _ever_ going to be a smart thing to do?! It didn’t matter if it was only a few pinpricks here and there, pain was pain.

Darcy had walked in mid-rage and as soon as she’d found out why Steve was shouting the place down and about the test that had occurred _without_ the permission of Bucky’s next of kin – his next of kin being one _Steven Grant Rogers_ as his official record had never been updated – she’d cleared the room, stepped out into the hall and had promptly picked up where Steve’s rant had left off.

With Darcy reaming out the staff in the hall, Steve had been left alone in the room with Bucky, trying to find a way to calm him down. He’d spent the next half hour folded over the side of the bed talking to him in a low murmur, running his fingers through his hair and rubbing the pad of his thumb over the arch of his eyebrow and the too-sharp slope of Bucky’s cheekbone, gentle as can be, until he’d calmed enough for the beeping of his heart monitor to slow and for the alarms to fall silent.

The reds, yellows and greens on the screen gradually returned to their usual soft blues, purples and pinks, but there hadn’t been a single hint of outward acknowledgement during the whole fiasco.

Not even a twitch.

They didn’t even _know_ if Bucky could hear them, not with one hundred percent certainty, anyway. There were multiple people suggesting that he could, but they just couldn’t be sure. He still talked to him every day and Darcy continued to read and play music for him, regardless. Just in case.

The only time anything ever changed on that fancy screen of Tony’s in the past week or so was when there’d been some physical contact and if that jackass quack had bothered to ask, Steve would have happily told him so.

He was so wrapped up in his own head that he didn’t notice Jane edging around the small table, nor did he register her pulling up a chair next to his.

It took too long for him to shake himself free of his thoughts and when Steve next blinked, Jane was sitting beside him and had his hand sandwiched between both of her own. He managed to stamp down a jerk of surprise and instead kept his eyes fixed on their hands. Hers were small and warm, callused in places and her fingers were tipped in chipped nail polish, a pretty gold that was ninety-eight percent glitter. He recognised it as one of the many, many shades that belonged in Darcy’s stash of pretty little bottles.

He was suddenly struck by how tiny Jane was. She was perhaps even smaller than he himself had been before the serum. 

“Everything I’ve learned about James Buchanan Barnes in these past few weeks tells me he’s not the type to just give up, Steve. He’s no quitter,” she reassured him, “Sure, he’s not awake yet, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t trying to be. There’s a chance that he hasn’t given up, so don’t you dare even consider giving up on him either. Look at that, Steve. _That_ -” she waved her hand in the direction of the screen on the wall where swirls of pink melted into blue and green as they watched, “ _that_ proves he’s in there, it’s just a matter of how many doors are between him and us. Now, I know that patience is a foreign concept for you,” she teased gently and his lips quirked up into a hint of a smile, “-but you need to give him time. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard this all must be… God, if something like this happened to Thor, I don’t even know how-”

_“Thor.”_

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Thor, what?”

Steve looked from her to Bucky, then over to Darcy and back again. “What if the reason he isn’t waking up isn’t because there’s too much physical damage?” At her look of confusion, Steve shifted to face her. The movement caught Darcy’s attention and it was enough to make her tug her headphones out and jerk her chin at them in question.

“What’s going on?”

Jane gave her a helpless shrug. “I don’t actually know–he just got all crazy eyed and started rambling..?”

“No!” He realised he was still clutching Jane’s hand in his and he let go of her with a sheepish wince. “Sorry,” he rubbed his sweaty palms up and down his thighs. “What if Bucky isn’t still asleep, for lack of a better term, because of physical injury, but because there’s something else keeping him that way? What if there _is_ a “door” but he can’t figure out how to open it on his own?” Both women looked at him warily, but he didn’t let it deter him. “You said it yourself, Jane,” he explained, “There’s _a lot_ going on up there, more and more each day but he’s still not showing any signs of waking up.”

“Steve, he’s catatonic,” she told him slowly, “I’m fairly certain that covers the whole ‘not waking up despite the lack of physical injury’ thing. He’s probably protecting himself.”

“No, I-” he shuffled in his seat and glanced over at Bucky, his protests dying in his throat. Jane was right. He was probably hiding away in there, convinced that he was still in that hellhole and whatever it was that was going on–all the care and kindness and warmth–was just some cruel ploy by HYDRA to lull him into a false sense of security before they yanked the rug out from underneath him for the umpteenth time. He was probably waiting for the hurting to start again. “You’re probably right,” he admitted, “but what if there’s a chance that’s not it? What if he _wants_ to wake up, but he _can’t._ ”

“What,” Jane’s nose wrinkled, “like he’s locked in?”

“Yes. That.”

He knew he was probably grasping at straws and he certainly knew that his theory was flimsy at best, but it was worth a shot, wasn’t it? “Could it be something related to his magic-shifter-mojo that’s keeping him under?”

“Steve,” Darcy uttered slowly, “Did you _seriously_ just call whatever it is that gave him his abilities ‘magic shifter mojo’?” Her brow quirked at him and she slowly set her computer aside. “ _Sweetie_.”

He heaved a sigh and slumped back in his seat, eyes fixed on the loose curl of Bucky’s fingers where they rested against the bedding. There was a circular scar in the middle of his palm that had a similarly placed twin on the back of his hand. His stomach twisted in knots just looking at the smooth edges of it.

“I don’t know how else to explain it, Darce,” he pinched the bridge of his nose and a few moments later she was sliding into his lap, arm looped around his neck with her fingers scratching into the short hair at the base of his skull. “I just wanna help him. He saved my ass so many times that-” one hand pulled her closer by the hip and the other gripped just above her knee. “He pulled me out of the fire so many times that I couldn’t keep count and I let him down. I let him down in spectacular fashion and I don’t want to do it again.”

There was a loaded silence and even though his face was buried in the curve of her neck, nose full of her perfume, he knew that Darcy and Jane were having one of their silent conversations that consisted of no more than a series of eyebrow quirks and facial tics.

“If we can figure out a way to track down Thor,” Jane hedged, “it might be possible that he can help, but then he might not. He might not know anything about it; he’s always said that he was in the shallow end of the gene pool when the magic got handed out. Doesn’t mean he might not know of someone who could.”

Steve momentarily lifted his head and blinked at her, wide eyed. “The gene pool thing… Was that a,” he hesitated, brows drawn, “- _a lion..king..?_ reference?” When Darcy let out a quiet, proud cheer, he hummed and pushed his face back into her shoulder. “I knew I knew that reference.”

Darcy’s fingers continued to card through his hair as the two women brainstormed between themselves with the occasional input from himself.

“I mean, Thor’s mom, Frigga, was pretty much the biggest witch that ever witched, right?”

Jane’s smile dimmed a little before her expression cleared and she nodded. “Essentially, yes,” she agreed, “We can’t really ask for her help with this though.”

“He spent his entire life surrounded by all types of magical people, beings, entities and artifacts... There’s the theory that every single living thing in existence has its own life essence – a signature, so to speak – that makes it possible to identify one from the other. If Thor is able to see that signature, or know of someone who can, maybe he’ll be able to point us in the right direction so we could potentially find some answers.”

Steve and Jane blinked at Darcy and she glowered back at them, spine rigid and cheeks blazing. “Why are you looking at me like that? It makes sense, doesn’t it? I’m not just a pretty face.”

He gathered her closer and scraped an open mouthed kiss to the soft stretch of skin just below her ear. “Not _just_ a pretty face, no.”

The answering smile she gave him was slow to form, but that didn’t mean it affected him any less. He loved the way the right side of her mouth always started to curl upwards first, then the soft spread of pink across the apples of her cheeks and the flash of that adorable gap between her teeth that was quick to follow.

_“- completely unfair. You two are adorable and why can’t I have a hot, blond, buff boyfriend that looks at me like that?”_

_“Jane..” Darcy spoke slowly and clearly. “You do.”_

_“But yours is on the same planet as you! Mine isn’t even here to snuggle at night and it gets cold here, Darcy! Where is my walking, talking furnace?!”_

_“Pretty sure he’s on one of the ‘-heim’s.”_

_“You’re not funny.”_

_“I’m a **little** funny.”_

Darcy let out a snicker against the top of his head and Steve closed his eyes briefly, relishing the sound of her being happy. Hearing her laugh had been kind of hit and miss lately and the sound of her laughter made his chest warm.

He idly wondered if Bucky _could_ hear them, like the doctors had suggested he might, and if he could, what was he thinking right now?

Would he be watching the two of them banter back and forth that same way he used to with Becca, Josie and Ruthie? With that indulgent grin he wore when he was truly happy, the one that made his nose crinkle and the dimples in both cheeks deepen enough to be visible, expression bemused but bright eyed and affectionate?

Or would he be watching them in that intense, unsettling way that only really appeared after he’d spent too many days wrapped up in his Skins? When his mind was still trying to decide whether he was an animal or man… 

Steve hadn’t mentioned anything to anyone about the strange behaviour that Bucky would exhibit when he spent too long in his animal form, not even to Darcy. Truth be told, he wasn’t sure what he would even say. He should have said something sooner, but he’d put it off again and again and now, three weeks and a multitude of tests and scans later, he wasn’t sure how to even broach the subject.

He felt like he’d left it too long. If he were to offer the information now, would they all be angry that he’d kept this from them?

How exactly was he supposed to explain that if his ex-lover spent over eight days straight in his animal form that he was left with lingering animal-like behavioural traits that could and _had_ affected his personality for many days after he’d shifted back?

Darcy would be upset, and she was definitely going to be hurt that hadn’t told her sooner. He hated upsetting her and he knew that was how this would end up panning out if he didn’t say something to her about it soon.

The longest Bucky had ever spent in his Skins with no lingering behavioural issues was eight days. He could manage nine, at a push, but he didn’t like doing it and he got a little rough around the edges if he tried.

_Any longer…_

Any longer than nine days and he’d get, well…He wasn't himself, exactly.

After nine days, all the things that made Bucky _“Bucky”_ blurred and fade until all that was left was a man who had the disquieting tendency to watch you in such a way that it left you wondering whether he saw you as a predator, _like him_ , or as prey.

Bucky had never hurt Steve when he was in bear form, ever, but there had been a few times–after he’d changed back– when even _he_ had wondered whether that strange gleam in his quicksilver eyes meant that Bucky was watching him because he was there, or if it was because he was trying to decide whether he’d be something _fun to hunt._

Every time Bucky spent too long in his Skins he lost a little of himself and the longer he stayed hidden away in there, the longer it took for him to come back, and the longer it took for him to _come back_ , the more of him there was that went missing. It wasn’t a common occurrence, but the times it’d happened had seemed like there’d been a fracture between the man he knew and the animal he became. His behaviour was unsettling during those times and even though he knew Bucky would return to normal in his own time, the wait was nerve wracking every time.

Being out of control like that, reduced to base animal instinct, had always scared Bucky to death. He’d once likened it to being trapped in the backseat of a car with no brakes as it hurtled towards the edge of a cliff; he could see the wreckage about to happen, but there was nothing he could do to stop it and he hated every second. He hated it so much that he didn’t like spending over four days at a time in his Skins, well under the weirdness threshold.

Steve hoped that Thor might be able to shed some light on the situation. If they could get Bucky the help he desperately needed, he sure as hell wanted to try. He’d do anything for Bucky, he really would, but there was a nervous part of him that wondered – even if they somehow woke him up - would there even be anything of Bucky Barnes left to help?

**

 _Something’s bothering him,_ Darcy thought as she watched Steve stare blindly at the microwave. She could tell he was willing the little glowing numbers to count down quicker. He’d been quiet for the past few hours, but since they’d headed back to their place he’d grown even more withdrawn and he’d barely said more than a dozen words since they’d walked through the door.

He was propped up against the counter with his arms folded over his chest and he looked _tired._

They’d been sent home for the night, both of them in desperate need of decent nights sleep in their own bed. Together. Darcy couldn’t remember the last time she’d fallen asleep beside Steve for longer than ten minutes at a time, let alone spent the night in their bed with her nose pressed between his shoulder blades, body curled around the ridiculously broad stretch of his back.

Yes. Steve Rogers liked to be the little spoon, not that she minded; that shocked-slash-indignant high-pitched shriek he’d let out when, in the dead of winter, she’d push the icy tip of her nose into that little dip in his spine was one of her top three favourite sounds _ever_.

The others were ‘sleepy puppy snuffles’ and the crackle-pop of a wood fire. The snuffling was self-explanatory and the crackling made her think of the annual family camping trips she’d always been forced into when she was a teenager. The ones she’d complain about being dragged upon and pretended to loathe but secretly loved and looked forward to every fall.

She’d bemoaned the lack of family camping trips to Steve once.

She whined about the fact that the family didn’t do it anymore now that they were all grown and out of the nest. Her older sister Cameron was a park ranger up in Alaska, so there weren’t exactly many chances for weekend camping trips with the fam-bam. Her younger sister, Ryan, lived in Washington State with her husband and their baby boy (whom she grudgingly admitted was adorable). Their youngest sister, Maisie, was in her second year of college in California and Darcy herself wasn’t in the position to take a weekend off to go traipsing around a cold, damp forest with her sisters, making s’mores with feet so soggy that trench-foot was a potential thing, just because she was feeling nostalgic, was she?

Steve hadn’t really made comment on her rant at the time. To be honest, she’d assumed he’d fallen asleep mid-whine, but three days later she’d found herself on the back of an ATV, arms wrapped around Steve’s waist as they made their way through the woods to an adorable little cabin she had no idea that Tony even owned.

Steve was good to her. He treated her well, called her on her bullshit when she needed to hear it and _he listened_. She wanted to do the same for him, she wanted to know how she could help and what she needed to do to do it, but it was hard to know where his head was at sometimes when getting information out of him could be like getting blood out of a stone.

Darcy waited until he’d finished the six slices of leftover pizza he’d reheated before she went in for the kill.

“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” She prodded and he stiffened against her, confirming her suspicions.

“S’nothing wrong,” he mumbled into her shoulder before reconsidering with a shrug, “no more than usual, anyway.”

“C’mon, Steve,” she sighed and pulled until he lifted his head so she could move to sit on the edge of the seat. “You’ve been skulking around the place since we got home, miserable as sin. Don’t lie to me, Steven Grant Rogers.” He flinched and she chewed on the inside of her cheek, trying to swallow down the anxiety that was clawing its way up her throat.

He’d seemed ok, if not a little subdued, when they’d been down with Bucky and it was only when they’d gone to leave that he’d started withdrawing. By the time they’d reached their front door he was noncommittal and mute. She knew he was worried about Bucky and was scared that something might go wrong and he wouldn’t be there, just in case, but it was impossible to avoid noticing how his mood had gone south once he realised he’d be alone with her.

She wasn’t oblivious. She’d noticed the way he’d be watching Bucky earlier, pensive and wistful, then the way his expression had shuttered completely he was unable to meet her eye..

Steve didn’t want to be alone with her and she wondered what exactly it was that she’d done to make him feel that way. He’d been seemingly fine discussing the possibility of tracking down Thor for potential information one minute, quiet and brooding the next.

Had she been hovering too much? Was he sick and tired of her prodding him to eat and drink and shower? Or was he just tired and grumpy, exhausted after weeks of stress and aggravation? Whatever it was, his silence cut her and she didn’t like the way her stomach churned or how her throat felt all heavy and tight.

“I know you don’t like leaving him, Steve,” she started, “and I get it. If I got back someone as important to me as he is to you after years of being without them I’d be a fucking mess at the thought of leaving the same room as them, too.” She paused, mulling over her next words. “But if you don’t want me here anymore, Steve, you need to tell me. I’m not gonna sit here and have you blank me in my own home because you can’t bear the thought of looking at me, so if-”

“Wait, wait,” he interrupted sharply, suddenly upright and wide eyed. “What the hell are you talking about? Why wouldn’t I want to be with you? Where is this coming fr-” he paused, eyes widening as he registered the latter part of her brief speech. “Darcy,” he edged closer and his hand cupped her knee, the warmth of it leeching through the leg of her sweatpants onto her skin. “Butterfly, I haven’t been ignoring you or giving you the silent treatment because I don’t want you here…” When she didn’t look at him he jostled her knee slightly until she did. “Darcy, look at me,” he ducked his head to peer past the curtain of her hair, “Darce, I haven’t been quiet because I’m upset with you. I’ve been quiet because I’m upset with _me_.”

She blinked, thrown by his admission. “What?”

He dragged his hand away from her knee to rub his face and the sigh he let out was heavy and long. “I-” he closed his mouth, opened it again and winced. “I need to tell you something,” he admitted. “Something I should have told you sooner than this, but I wasn’t sure how to word it and then before I knew it three weeks had gone by and it felt too late and I wasn’t sure how to tell you at all,” he took a breath, expression miserable, “-and I know you’re gonna be hurt that I didn’t trust you with this sooner.”

Her head hurt trying to keep up with his rambling, but what she _could_ discern from it was that he’d been hiding something from her. It dawned on her that his silence hadn’t been about anger or disinterest; it was about guilt.

He was feeling guilty about keeping something from her and her stomach twisted, hot and ugly as she thought about what it could be.

“You can tell me now.” She congratulated herself on how steady she sounded when inside she was a mess of knots. “Go on.”

He blinked hard and she watched his fingers curl into a tight fist, then uncurl to lay flat against his thigh. “If he wakes up, I don’t know what will happen.” He started, and her heart thumped painfully in her chest. “I don’t know who he’ll be.”

The increasingly sick swirling in her stomach screamed to a halt and she shook her head. “I’m sorry, what?” This, she thought to herself, was not what she was expecting him to say. Who he was going to be? What was that supposed to mean? “You’re gonna need to elaborate for me here because you have _officially_ lost me.”

He shuffled on the spot and angled himself toward her a little more. “When we were younger, and Bucky was just starting to get the hang of the whole Bucky-Bear thing-”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Tony,” she murmured, trying to hide her smirk despite the current mood in the room and he glanced at her with a wry smirk that quickly faded.

“-we noticed that the longer he spent in his Skins, the more his behaviour was affected.”

“Who’s we?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Barnes,” he answered readily, “Me and the girls too. He was the same in bear form as he was when he was on two feet. Just a lot bigger with sharper teeth and claws.”

She nodded, confused by the new information so far, but curious to figure out how it was relevant. “Right…?”

He hurried to explain. “He was just as easy going _in_ his Skins as he was _out_ of them, for a few days at least. To start with it was more about figuring out how to control his shift, what triggered it and what he needed to focus on to keep his cool so he didn’t accidentally slip up in public.” He smiled, small and nostalgic. “The only reason I ever found out was because he slipped up and accidentally took out the table in his parent’s kitchen.”

Darcy’s brows both lifted in surprise and her lip curled in amusement, curious. “Dare I ask?”

“One of Buck’s sisters, Josie, came home one day all scuffed up. She was crying because one of the boys in her class had tripped her up, called her names and the next thing I know, their table is in pieces on the floor and Mrs. Barnes is wedged up against the counter, hollerin’ and smacking the shit out of a fucking _bear_ in the middle of their kitchen with a rolled up dish towel.”

She couldn’t help it. A snort turned slipped out as she envisioned the scene. “And the table?”

Slightly more at ease now that he was finally telling her the whole story, Steve laced his fingers with hers and was pitifully relieved when she squeezed his hand in return.

“He was standing next to it when he shifted. Lost his temper when he saw Josie’s scraped up hands and how upset she was because some boy had been mean to her,” he made a loose fist then splayed his fingers out to mimic an explosion. “He went boom, the table died a death and I had an asthma attack from the shock of it. Good times were had by all.”

He smiled to himself the memory and even though she was still confused, Darcy smiled too. Just a little.

“Once I’d recovered from my lungs trying to kill me off, all I could see was Bucky in bear form, big enough to take up most of the space in the family kitchen, cowering against the wall as his mother lectured him for not only losing his temper and exposing his abilities to someone outside the immediate family, but for ruining the table that Bucky’s Grandpa had made Mr. and Mrs. Barnes as a wedding gift.”

His mouth stretched in a wide, genuine grin as he adopted a tone that she assumed was a mimicry of Bucky’s mother;

_“That table has survived thirteen years, two house moves, four rough and tumble children and_ **_you_ ** _, James Buchanan Barnes;_ **_you_ ** _take it out with a three second temper tantrum! Do you have any idea how hard your grandfather worked to build that?! What do you have to say for yourself?!”_

He shook his head at the thought of it. “She beat the hell out of him with the towel she kept by the sink. Rolled it all up and walloped him good and proper with it. Never seen anything like it, Darce,” he huffed, “Me, Becca, Josie and Ruthie couldn’t stop giggling and pushing and shoving and Mrs Barnes just glared at us, but I could tell she wasn’t really mad. She was trying not to smile the entire time and there’s Buck… A few hundred pounds of bear tucked right up against the wall grumbling and making this sad noise because he felt bad but he wasn’t sure how to change back yet so he could say sorry.”

“He didn’t know how?”

“No,” he shook his head, “not for a while, he didn’t. To start with the shift was almost always accidental, if he got upset or overwhelmed he’d lose focus and more often than not he’d have to just wait it out. It took a lot out of him for the first few months and he’d just end up falling asleep with four legs, waking up with two. He got the hang of it eventually, but it took about seven or eight months for him to change at will or smoothly.”

As frustrated and hurt as she’d been with Steve for the past few hours, as hurt as she felt by his behaviour, she had a feeling that he was getting to his point. To why he’d been acting the way he had.

She could see he was trying to organise his thoughts and reached for one of the numerous throw cushions that they kept scattered around for random napping purposes. They didn’t go with the sofa or the décor, they were all clashing colours and fabrics and textures that had grabbed their eyes at some point or another.

She hugged a neon orange fluffy cushion to her chest and shuffled until she was fully facing him, feet tucked up underneath his thigh and waited. She wasn’t surprised in the least when his fingers found their way under the cuff of her sweats and curled around her ankle. His palm was warm against her skin and she tried – and failed – to ignore the flood of warmth that barrelled through her when she remembered the last time he’d grabbed her by the ankle, granted it wasn’t exactly so innocent last time…

 _Fuckssake,_ she grumbled to herself, _you’re meant to be mad at him. Stop thinking about that time he grabbed you by the ankles and dragged you to the edge of the bed, dropped to his knees and—_

_STOP. IT._

Unaware of the detour her thought process had taken or the mental bitch-slap she’d just given herself, Steve finally found his words.

“Bucky was the first person in his family born with the gift in four or five generations, I can’t remember which. It could’ve been more, but I don’t know,” he shook his head. “There was nobody there to explain anything to him. He didn’t know what was happening to him, his parents didn’t know and neither did his grandpa. Nobody knew what to expect or how things went… It was one of those ‘just roll with it’ things, you know?”

Darcy made a barely there sound of acknowledgement. “That had to be scary for him,” she noted without noticing that she’d started to absently knead at his thigh with her toes, “Hell of a learning curve. It’s not every day you wake up and find out you’re a part time bear.”

Steve snorted humourlessly. “That’s one way of putting it.” His head dropped back against the back of the sofa and he blinked rapidly a few times before he took a deep breath and blinked hard.

“There was some trial and error,” he explained, subdued. “His poor Ma was always trying to mend his clothes after his temper got the best of him and he’d accidentally shift; luckily he grew like crazy once it all settled and he could wear his dad’s old hand-me-downs. There was nobody still around who could tell him how hungry he’d be all the time or how much stronger he’d be,” he thumbed at his bottom lip with one hand and stroked the bump of her ankle bone with the other, “-nobody to tell him how dangerous it was to spend extended periods of time in his Skins.”

There was a loaded silence, and it was with mounting horror that Darcy realised what he’d been trying to tell her since this whole conversation started. What he’d meant by _who he’d be when he woke up_.

“How long was too long?” She questioned in a wobbly voice, almost too scared to hear the answer. “How long was it safe to be in his Skins and what would happen if he went over that?”

“He could manage eight days fine enough,” The loop of Steve’s fingers around her ankle tightened, loosened, then tightened again. “Anything longer than that though... He’d get weird.”

“ _Weird_ , how?”

**

Steve shuffled in his seat and pulled her feet into his lap, laced their fingers together. Now that he was explaining himself, which he should have done right from the goddamn start, she seemed to be a little more accepting of his hands on her and he was only just realising the impression that his silence must have given her.

God, he was such a fucking idiot for keeping this shit to himself. All he had to do was open his fucking mouth; wallowing in his own misery and guilt wasn’t going to do him any favours. It wasn’t going to do _either_ of them any favours. She seriously thought he wanted her to leave? Christ, that was gonna take some grovelling to fix.

She wriggled until she was closer, close enough to huddle under his arm and he sent out a silent thanks to whoever could be bothered to listen that she didn’t seem as upset with him as she had a few minutes ago. _Funny that_ , he mused, _the wonders that telling the truth could do._

“Well,” he breathed in deep, tucked her in a little closer to him and exhaled through his nose. “It was when we were teenagers, way before the war. It wasn’t safe for him to spend any longer than necessary in his Skins when we were deployed, so more often than not, he’d pretend he’d dropped one of his knives or his tags somewhere along the way so he could slip away. I’d always offer to help him look and I’m sure the guys knew something was going on, it just wasn’t what they thought it was. They always shooed us off and set up camp while we were gone. They never said anything about it, but we always had an excuse, whatever was convenient so he could disappear off into the woods and _‘slip into something’ a little more comfortable’_.”

“Oh, I bet he did,” she implied with a snort.

Steve shrugged easily. “Hey, anything to help my guy, right?” His eyes widened at her snort and he bumped his knuckles against her shin. “Nothing like that, Darce, Jesus!” He paused. “Well, not when he was all teeth and claws, anyway.”

She bit the inside of her cheek as she tried not to laugh and Steve couldn’t resist nuzzling into her hair. “Probably a wise decision,” she sobered and nudged him with her knee. “Alright, let’s back it up a little bit. What happened when you were teenagers?”

“He got it into his head that it would be a good idea to see how long he could go before he needed to change back.” It’d been over the summer and Steve _still_ didn’t know how they’d got away with harbouring a giant bear in the middle of Brooklyn with nobody finding out. “His Ma put her foot down after ten days when he started getting pushy with his sisters. He didn’t hurt them, I don’t think there’s any part of him that ever could, but he was making them nervous. Definitely wasn’t himself, either.”

“Am I right in assuming that the odd behaviour lingered after he changed back?”

His thumb circled absently over the inside of her knee and he gave her a slow, single nod. “Mm.” He thought back to Bucky’s behaviour after that week and a half when they were kids and his jaw clenched. “He snapped out of it after a few days, but before he did there was this strange stillness about him and if he wasn’t watching you, if his eyes weren’t tracking every damn move you made, he was prowling around after you. It felt like-”

“-he was stalking you.” She finished quietly.

Steve swallowed thickly and nodded. “Yeah,” he cleared his throat and blinked until his eyes stopped burning. “Yeah.”

“If he was like that after ten days and we have no idea how long he was locked up in that shithole, stuck like that…” both of her hands curled around the one of his, “What do you think he’ll be like when he wakes up?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted with a sigh. “Butterfly, I don’t even know how much of him is gonna be left. He might not even know who I am.”

“There was enough of him in there to recognise you when you found him,” she tried to reassure him as she curled against his side, “If he recognised you then, even if it was just your smell, there’s a chance he’ll remember you when he wakes up too. And if he doesn’t? Well, we can work on that. Patience is a virtue, right?”

“Right.” He tried to force his hands still and pushed his face into her neck to cover up how unsteady his breathing had become. He knew he wasn’t doing a very good job of it when she untangled their hands and wrapped herself around him. Her fingers kneaded the back of his neck and it wasn’t until she started crooning at him, soft and comforting, that he even realised he was snivelling into her neck again.

God, _again_. He was such a fucking mess.

“It’ll be ok,” she mumbled against the top of his head, “We’ll figure it out, ok? It’ll be alright.”


End file.
